In an innovative measure, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to host a social networking site linked to its portal allowing engineering students interact with each other about their projects.

It will also deploy software major Microsoft's popular live@edu, a free suite of hosted Microsoft services and applications intended for educational needs, as a solution to provide better communication and collaboration platform both for institutes and students.

Talking about the social networking platform, AICTE chairman S S Mantha said this site will help "every student to put their research work on the portal and have an exchange".

"This application (live@edu) along with social networking will provide immense opportunities to students to interact and also work out with the other project," he told reporters.

Live@edu, whose full deployment will be completed in the next couple of months, will benefit about 7.5 million students spread over 10,000 technical institutes in the country.

Some of the feature available under this application include email and calender with 10GB inbox, 25GB of additional file storage, document sharing instant messaging, video chat and mobile email.

More than 10,000 schools in more than 130 countries have enrolled in live@edu, benefiting 22 million people world wide, Microsoft claims.