New York Schools Eschew Microsoft for Google

"In the absence of the cloud, there is no such thing as 24/7, and certainly not for schools," said Silverman.

This is not possible in the traditional on-premise model perpetuated by Microsoft Office and Exchange. To compete for school seats, Microsoft offers Live@edu, its Web-based messaging and collaboration solution.
The company recently teamed with ePals to provide 3-mail to New York City Schools to 2 Million students and parents, and enjoys 11 million installed seats in 10,000 schools.

In total, Google has racked up more than 8 million seats across the school districts in Oregon, Iowa, Colorado and Maryland.

For Google's New York deal, each district has the opportunity to choose its own resources.

Deborah O'Connell, deputy superintendent at Clarkstown Central School District, told eWEEK she has had some 3,000 teachers, administrators and students using Google Apps for several months, with a systemwide rollout coming this year.

O'Connell said students are particularly using Google Docs, including documents, spreadsheet and presentation apps to work solo and together on class projects. School administrators used Google Apps to create standards-based report cards for 10 elementary schools.  

While Google isn't making money from Google App Education Edition, it is systematically shutting out Microsoft, IBM or any other collaboration provider from setting up shop in public schools.

Google is responsible for ushering collaboration software into the cloud more than three years ago, incumbents such as Microsoft and IBM have hundreds of millions of seats installed all over the world, making it hard for Google to gain traction.