Microsoft’s latest challenge could net money for college students but only from certain colleges
Microsoft’s Business Plan Collaborative Challenge 2012 is now underway. But this isn’t a competition open to any college student. No you have to be attending one of only ten colleges whose students are allowed to participate. Those colleges are: Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, or the University of Washington.
Students who decide to participate in the Challenge, can be undergraduate or graduate students who are working on a business plan for a university competition. The students must use SkyDrive while working with other students on the plan.
One winner from each school business plan competition will receive $5,000. If more than one plan wins, the team that showed the best collaboration will win the prize. After all, the whole idea behind the Business Plan Collaborative Challenge is to showcase how well students can work together using SkyDrive.
SkyDrive allows you to store Word documents, Excel worksheets, OneNote notebooks, photographs and Power Point presentations in the cloud. You can access the them from any computer at home, work or school with your Windows Live ID. That means that if your computer crashes, all of your work isn’t lost.
Even better, you can choose whether anyone else has access to each file and what type of access they have. For example, teaching assistants can post class assignments for their students. Students working together on a project can actually edit the same documents, presentations and worksheets. You can choose what graphics to use and then decide the best place to put them in the presentation. Microsoft has tips for using SkyDrive to collaborate here.
The Business Plan Competition is one way that Microsoft can get future entrepreneurs invested using its products. SkyDrive works with basic Microsoft Office programs and helps transport what you have on your computer, into the cloud. From there it is just a short step from using Azure and Sharepoint for company wide communications and coordination.
While the competition is great for the students who attend those 10 chosen schools, it’s a shame that no schools were chosen from the South like Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, or the University of Georgia. More and more companies are moving their headquarters down to Southern states, it would only make sense to train future business executives and entrepreneurs down South as well.
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