Microsoft has released a government-specific edition of its Office 365 cloud-based email and collaboration suite that offers U.S. public-sector customers a cordoned-off data center infrastructure just for them.

About 4.5 million Catholic school students will get access to Microsoft's Office 365 cloud e-mail and collaboration suite as part of a 3-year deal the software vendor struck with the Catholic International Education Office (OIEC).

Felix Ehm, a member of CERN's beams control group, has always had a curious and scientific bent.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) will provide email and collaboration applications to about 600,000 students via Microsoft's Live@EDU cloud suite, a project for which it also considered Google Apps for Education.

Although the U.S. Interior Department plans to replace its on-premise email servers with Google Apps' cloud-based Gmail, the agency will retain Microsoft Outlook and Office as its standard e-mail client and desktop office productivity software for end users.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has picked Google Apps to provide cloud-based email and collaboration applications to about 90,000 staffers, choosing Google's services over Microsoft's Office 365.

To find out what email marketing tips are trending and showing success with list subscribers, CIO.com spoke with leading email marketing vendors and analysts to come up with this best-of-breed email marketing tactics list.

Microsoft is sticking to its plan to shut down its Office Live Small Business (OLSB) suite of cloud-based services on Monday, even though it seems many customers are either unaware of the deadline or are having difficulties migrating.

Communication is the lifeblood of productivity. Businesses need to communicate with customers, managers need to communicate with employees, and workers need to communicate with peers. Effective communication is a crucial element of getting things done.

Email/calendar systems are the most important communications channels for enterprises, and deliver a reliable, cost-effective and secure mechanism for collaboration. An email system is typically used for a decade before suppliers are changed: organisations should apply significant due diligence in selecting an email system, given the criticality of email to their overall health.

When Ben Fried left his post as IT managing director at Morgan Stanley and took over as Google's CIO in May 2008, he knew what he was getting into: supporting a user base full of technology experts and computer industry stars, like co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt and Vice President Vint Cerf. In a recent interview with IDG News Service, Fried spoke candidly about his job and shared tips and advice for fellow CIOs, including the urgent need for tablet device strategies. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

Have you checked your work e-mailtoday? If you're like most employees in the United States and United Kingdom, the answer is yes despite the fact that it is not only the weekend, but an extended holiday weekend for most workers in the US. A day off is becoming an increasingly foreign concept as workers stay connected virtually 24/7.

Integrating enterprise communication tools -- from telephony to e-mail, conferencing and instant messaging -- is the key to delivering a richer collaboration environment that increases productivity. But deployment and management of unified communications systems can be daunting.