Free Service from IAM Cloud to Drive Academic Adoption of Microsoft’s Student Advantage Program

Huddersfield, United Kingdom, November 13, 2013 --(PR.com)-- IAM Cloud, providers of the world's largest Windows Azure IaaS deployment, announced today Federate 365 MLP, a free service that will help academic institutions make Office 365 ProPlus easily available to their students. Federate 365 MLP is designed to help kickstart adoption of Microsoft’s new Student Advantage program by eliminating the complexities associated with licensing and provisioning of a large number of users.

More than 35,000 academic institutions are eligible for the Student Advantage program. However, before students are granted access to Office 365, all student accounts must be provisioned and licensed in Office 365. At a minimum, this requires deployment and configuration of a DirSync server and either manual or scripted assignment of each account to the Student Advantage plan. This preparatory step can prove to be complex and time consuming for institutions with large student bodies and insufficient IT resources.

Federate 365 MLP offers a simple and painless way to provide Office 365 ProPlus to students without any additional servers or consultancy costs. Based on IAM Cloud’s successful Federate 365 platform, which currently hosts nearly 2,000,000 identities, the MLP service provides Managed Licensing and Provisioning for the Student Advantage plan. It is completely free and has the following key benefits:

· Automated provisioning of new Office 365 accounts for students
· Automated licensing of the Office 365 Student Advantage plan
· Password sync from on-premises Active Directory accounts

“Federate 365 MLP is an extremely valuable service for academic institutions,” said Laila Bogdanski, Director of Business Development at Channel Solutions. “The main challenges that will stop schools from utilizing the Student Advantage program are related to identity management, user provisioning, licensing, and password synchronization. IAM Cloud’s service overcomes all these issues.”

In addition to rapid deployment, which can ensure that student accounts are up and running in a matter of hours, Federate 365 MLP also provides a true single sign-on link to the Student Advantage Office ProPlus download. Another benefit of the service is that it is hosted wholly in Windows Azure data centers and sets up the foundation for an easy transition to other Federate 365 plans.

“IAM Cloud is committed to making a meaningful difference in education. With Federate 365 MLP we want to help academic organizations overcome the hurdles of identity management and provisioning so they can easily offer Microsoft Office ProPlus via the Student Advantage program,” said Jeff Dalby, Vice President of North American Operations at IAM Cloud. “Federate 365 MLP is the only product on the market that is able to provision identities and automatically assign Student Advantage plans. It does this without the need for additional hardware, complex ADFS deployments, or custom scripting. Best of all, it’s free.”

Federate 365 MLP will be available worldwide on December 1, the same day as Microsoft’s Student Advantage program begins. For additional information on how K-12 schools and higher education organizations can take advantage of IAM Cloud’s free offering go to http://www.iamcloud.com/federate365/mlp/ .

About IAM Cloud
IAM Cloud are the creators of Federate 365, the world’s largest Windows Azure IaaS deployment. Federate 365 removes the single points of failure, complexity, and on premise hardware associated with federating access to SaaS solutions. IAM Cloud currently hosts 1.7 Million identities worldwide.