From the Reuters article Microsoft heads to college to pitch Windows Live we get the following excerpt

The decision to outsource the University of Texas-Pan American's 17,000 student e-mail accounts to Microsoft Corp. for free was a simple one for Gary Wiggins, the school's top IT administrator.

Students hated the existing system and its limited storage, lack of features -- like a calendar, for example -- and cumbersome user interface.

"The legacy system we were moving from was so bad that the new features were very well-accepted," said Wiggins, who is the school's vice president for information technology.

The school could still create e-mail addresses ending in utpa.edu and many students were already familiar with Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service.

The University of Texas Pan-American is not alone in linking up with Microsoft. The world's largest software maker has clinched deals to host e-mail systems for 72 institutions around the world and is in active discussions to add almost 200 more schools.

Microsoft sees its push onto college campuses as a way to promote its new Windows Live platform, an advertising-funded one-stop shop for Microsoft's Web services from e-mail to news to instant messaging to blogs.

The Windows Live @edu folks have done quite a bit over the past few months. I totally dig what we are doing with projects like theirs and Windows Live Custom Domains. I've actually started factoring in their scenarios when thinking about the next generation of Windows Live communication services we'll be building. The more Windows Live services we get to participate in this the better. Being able to give people email and IM accounts using the my own domain is a great first step but there are a bunch more things I'd like to see.