In 2012 the University of West London (UWL) decided to create a student portal using Microsoft’s Office 365 offering. The University started off without a student portal and they didn’t have a single sign on. The students have had a hard time trying to find the information and services they needed and trying to remember which user ID and password to use to access the systems. Each student had separate accounts for email, the VLE and for access to their student record. University of West London wanted to create a platform that would allow students to interact with each other in a safe, secure and academically driven environment.” (UCISA, 2012). Rather than develop a basic gateway for students to access the institution’s services, the University decided to build a personalized, interactive, social platform allowing students to combine social learning with academic study. The staff was established to explore options for collaborative working.
There were three different approaches that were being considered: an in house developed bespoke solution; an off the shelf on premise solution and a solution hosted entirely in the Cloud. The in-house bespoke solution was ruled out because of the high development, support and infrastructure costs. It would also take too long to implement as the University had set a go live target date of the last week of August 2012, to coincide with the start of enrolment. The off the shelf solution hosted was ruled about because of the high infrastructure, support and maintenance costs. Most of the off the shelf solutions also lacked the modern messaging and collaboration tools that were essential for the success of the project. Therefore it was decided to opt for a free solution hosted entirely in the Cloud. Given our existing investment and skills in using Microsoft technology it made sense to select Microsoft’s Office 365 product suite. A