Warwickshire County Council have migrated to a hybrid on-premise/online solution for their education service portal ‘WeLearn’

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Warwickshire County Council are moving their schools Education service portal ‘WeLearn’ from on-premise editions of Exchange and SharePoint to Office 365 for Education.  The system includes a ‘thin layer’ portal that has been designed and developed on SharePoint Online, and MIS data integrated from Capita SIMS that is hosted on an on-premise SQL Server farm within the Warwickshire HQ.  Each teacher now gets a 25GB mailbox quota and the service includes Office Web Apps as well as being able to offer plug-in content and apps from third party sources to support teaching and homework.

Soundbite from the article:

[The] vision is to provide a portal which gives schools “20% of the features that most VLEs have, but delivers 80% of the things which schools actually need”.

The new system is quoted as being significantly lower cost than most traditional VLEs or school portals.

Note: This is a hybrid cloud computing scenario, mix of online services and on-premise servers.

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Source: Microsoft UK Schools Blog, May 2012