Licensing: Select versus Schools Agreement

[ITWombat]

Which MIcrosoft licensing scheme do you use?

Is it right to say that Select + Software Assurance = Schools Agreement?

TIA

[DMcCoy]

Not quite, there are a few extras under schools agreement.

You get Windows PE to use
You get Corp error reporting console

Not that either of these are very exciting :P

You can also increase the number of machines during the year and only have to license them when the next renewal - this only applies to the windows upgrade office cals afaik. Servers have to be licensed, so I always get extra for those.

It might however end up costing you more money, although it is to a great extent a predicatable cost, although you do own the software outright as it is leased (although you can use buyout I believe).

We use the schools agreement, it has saved me lots of time messing around with MS licenses. I just make sure the machines comes in with XP pro (although home would do) and its covered for most of the things I want to use on it.

If you only want a small number of machines using a product, stick with select as you often need to get the same number of licenses as the number of windows clients you have (not server software though).

[john]

I use select through the SST agreement at Ramesys for those schools that I work with that qualify, and those that don't just get standard Select from Ramesys. I always get SA on them as its pointless not getting it with Vista and Office 2007 around the corner.

[GrumbleDook]

Being honest ... even with Vista and office 2007 round the corner it will still be 2008+ before I roll them out, and even then it will probably just be office. I will still roll out XP to the desktop (unless new machines bought with Vista on don't contain downgrade rights).

I only use XP now because server 2003 is prepared for it ... until there is a reliable Server OS with capacity for GPOs the work reliably I can't see the point in moving ...

Vista is nice to play with but adds nothing to productivity that can't be found elsewhere and I have seriously looked to see if I can find anything that improves learning ... and found diddly squat.

[ITWombat]

@john

SST? Specialist School Trust? Do specialist schools get cheaper pricing?

[GrumbleDook]

Yep ... Ramesys, on behalf of the SSAT, negotiated a deal with M$ ... Becta then negotiated pretty much the same deal for *all* schools ... so Ramesys went back to M$ and negotiated again ... as well as coming up with some interesting deals.

[kingswood]

I agree with Tony about Vista- there's nothing there that I can see that would improve learning or lessen the workload of staff or technical support bods. It's just...got a nice GUI. Some of the interface touches are very good- but then I'm a Mac user so it's hard to please me (and even Ubuntu with Xgl whips Vista into the next century--and that's without comparing features and security).

Office 2007 is a nice product though. The use of contextual ribbons and the blogging integration with pretty good HTML output are very good ideas. Used on XP the interface doesn't seem as "bland" though as when you use it on Vista. Strange. It could just be that Vista black theme...

Oh- and we use Select :-)

[thom]

We buy computers with XP home and then buy xp upgrades from Ramesys for about £30. We get office for about £30 too.

We had a licensing specialist sent from Microsoft to try and sell us the School's Agreement but he had to admint defeat when our way worked out a lot cheaper.

The only way it would have benefitted us was if we hadn't already paid for the 300 PCs the school had (i.e. start from scratch). So it seemed pointless.

Quick note on Vista - Not much benefit seen yet from a learning perspective (apart from the mobility/ projector functionality for staff laptops) but from a technical point of view the setup is a lot more reliable as it's all component based (this means that one image should work on a wide range of computers without crashing). Saying that, I wouldn't upgrade the school until XP support has ended or Longhorn Server is out.

[CyberNerd]

...but vista will be great!
Its going to be so much more secure and reliable, just like the upgrade to XPSP2 was, and SP1 and XP from 2k, 2k from ME, ME from 98........... Hang on, I see a pattern here!

[mac_shinobi]

...but vista will be great!
Its going to be so much more secure and reliable, just like the upgrade to XPSP2 was, and SP1 and XP from 2k, 2k from ME, ME from 98........... Hang on, I see a pattern here!

Give that man a drink someone!

[Simcfc73]

We use the schools agreement.

3 servers.
1 Exchange Server
1 SQL server
Microsoft Desktop (office etc...)
Recently got Encarta (which was £2.40 per machine).

For 155 machines our renewal was over £5k

With all the cals sorted and the yealry upgrade to Encarta I can't see us changing unless they decide to change it again.

[cookie_monster]

I was just about to post a new thread on this subject then I came across this and thought I’d drag it back to life

We're thinking along the lines of buying Office 2007 on select as we're currently on Office 2003 then also buying Windows 7 and Server 2008 outright as well (as soon as available). This should give us at least 5-7 years before we need to buy a new client OS and a good few years before we need to update Office.
Our school is not expanding so I don't foresee us buying many extra PC's only replacements, we are also rolling out more Citrix clients so our full Windows client numbers should decrease.

Am I missing any major pitfalls here?

Opinions please?

Thanks.