As we have been on Live@Edu since about June 1st, we have had a couple meetings where multi-departmental groups have discussed email.  The biggest request that come out of the discussions was from the financial aid office.  Their question was "How do we know that students got their financial aid information?"

Our Universtiy uses email as "Official Communication."

"If they did get it, did they log-in and read it?"

"If they didn't get it, then we have to contact them via alternate means."

In talking with our consultant Randy from Oxford, he said that the only "Time" indicator out there was a languange date that gets set becuase of the first login when the users picks their languange at activation time.

All that would tell us is their activation date.  It wouldn't tell us anything about a specific email message and whether or not it was recieved or read.

So anything Microsoft can do to help would be great.  Thanks. -Tim

My view is if you provide a feature - it should apply to the whole service. So however you access Outook Live, whether it be web browser, Outlook, or desktop client - the reporting mechanism should be consistent.

In the interim, the existing limitations should be well documented.

As mentioned in the comment above, the ability for a faculty to determine if a message has been read is potentially useful too - but that seems out of scope for your question.

A fair percentage of our users have Macs and a majority of those are fond of Apple Mail. My assumption is that Mail will need to use IMAP/SMTP to communicate with the Exchange Server. Perhaps there will be an improvement in Snow Leopard? I mean, if an iPhone can use Exchange Sync, why shouldn't Mail talk nicely with Exchange? By the way, our president uses a Mac and Apple Mail but we got one of his high level assistants to use Entourage when we had Exchange IMAP problems.

Regardless, a significant number of our users would possibly fall into this category and it would be important to provide them with the same reporting tools as Windows PC users.

A very small number of users are on Linux.  ~ Brien

I would really like it if I could change the interface so that I dont have to use that conversation view/theme/interface. I like the one like hotmail and yahoo! has, that lets you delete multiple messages. I still see it when using an older version of Firefox on a Linux(Xubuntu). Im suprised I dont use that explorer. And when replying, the separate message box likes to automatically minimize a lot and it's annoying. Please do something about it. :>

I support some new themes, although you guys are working on that later. Or maybe my college did something so I can't have them.

Sorry to double-post, but I also support the whole POP email accounts thing. I'd like to use it with hotmail.

We're just getting onto Live moving from GroupWise, which has internal email tracking built in.  This addition would be a huge boon to those who, as Mr. Beske put it, use email as their "Official Communication" standard, us included.  There are too many options out there to access email remotely, and our students are more on their smartphones connecting than they are the web.  So yes yes yes... please!

Yes. It may be a critical email that you need to determine if it was delivered for Legal or compliance reasons. If this is defeated by accessing the mail via pop/imap it really defeats the purpose of being able to track it. Please add this into the feature list.

for book delivery in oneline classes looking for a place to comfirm their arrival

I too think that this is an important addition. I expected that like the Message Tracking Agent in an on-site implimentation it would track if a message was delivered to the mailbox and it is irrelevant how the client checks the mailbox. I can also see a use for the suggestion of being able to confirm an email has been read but don't think that is as important to us as being able to check it was delivered to the mailbox.

I know that our Information Security Team were disappointed that SMTP delivery was not documented in Delivery Reports for Administrators.  It  has been one of the hold ups with our implementation of the service.