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Office 365 has also found favor with the Fresno Unified School District, which is in the process of migrating students and staff to Office 365. The biggest benefit will come simply from moving Exchange in to the cloud, according to Kurt Madden, the District's CTO. "We have six servers at our main site, and another site for redundancy, and we will be able to get rid of all of that," he said.

The district manages about 280TB of storage for Exchange, and adds about 30GB per day, all of which will be moved to Microsoft's cloud. The district also receives between 4 million and 10 million spam emails per day, an amount that Madden says was beginning to overwhelm the organization's anti-spam systems, but which Microsoft will now filter in the cloud.

Madden estimates that the cost savings from migrating Exchange alone will amount to a conservative $1 per student per year, saving the district up to $100,000 per year. But Office 365 will also provide students with access to Word, PowerPoint, Excel and SharePoint, something which has rarely been provided before, plus a shared My Site space. Students will be able to work on PCs in schools, and complete their homework on whatever device they happen to own--a Mac, a PC, or a mobile device such as an iPad.

With the cost benefits that it is able to offer, Office 365's success in the educational market looks assured. But what can Microsoft do to encourage adoption of Office 365 in the enterprise space?