The Adelaide-based university signed the deal after a 12-month trial of the internally developed open source platform, Google and other hosted email systems.

The university's infrastructure manager, Dean Gawler, said Live@edu will give IT staff greater flexibility to concentrate on internal student management systems.

"We were looking to maximise how we used our internal resources and infrastructure, and we thought if people are out there who can provide email services just as effectively than we can, we'd be crazy to not consider those," he said.

"Then we will be able to use our internal recourses to do other things and bring more benefit to the university."

The move follows , which began rolling out Live@edu in May, the , which began in March and most-recently Perth-based .