Microsoft Live@edu offers every student and teacher Outlook Web Access as a method of accessing their email in a branded, web-based environment. This is great because it means users can gain access to their information from practically any web-enabled device with a browser. In a school environment it may be beneficial for students and teachers to access their Live@edu account using the Microsoft Outlook client as part of the Office suite of applications.

Luckily there is a way to configure Outlook automatically for your users so when they run it for the first time they will be ready to go!

Automatically Configure Microsoft Outlook For Live@edu

Requirements:

• A Microsoft Windows server running Active Directory
• Access to modify your DNS entries for your Live@edu domain
• Outlook 2007 or 2010
• Some patience

Step One: Configure Autodiscovery

The piece of magic that makes this all come together is Autodiscovery. In Live@edu you can use a CNAME record to let your Outlook clients connect to Live@edu using the Autodiscover service. If you want to use Outlook clients with Live@edu, you have to configure a CNAME record in your domain.

The Autodiscover CNAME record must contain the following information:

• Alias     autodiscover
• Target   autodiscover.outlook.com

For more information on how to configure CNAME records, see: http://bit.ly/aXuw8U

Step Two: Configure Active Directory

In order for this to work effectively you need to ensure that your users in Active Directory have their Name, Email, and Password fields filled in. When Outlook client is run it will look to populate fields with this information automatically. If your users to not authenticate with Active Directory they will need to fill in this information themselves when Outlook asks for it.

Step Three: Test!

[vimeo 16734443 w=480 h=330]This short clip shows an example student user opening Outlook 2010 for the first time, clicking through the wizard and having his details automatically filled in by the system. In a matter of seconds our student has his Outlook client fully configured for use with Live@edu.