Justifiying Schools agreement

[jumpinjamez]

Hello

i was after some feedback on how many of you actually buy schools agreement.

Since joining my current school i have insisted on schools agreement from the start as no one really knew anything about the Licensing.

After two year now the cost of this has gone from £9000 to £170000 due to more servers , more computers and laptops.

I now have the smt asking why now £17000 will be spent each year when before i started no money was spent :? .

Also does anyone know if SQL connections are covered by the scholls agreement CALSs?

Any info would be great.

JameZ

[Norphy]

Justify by saying "Better £17k annually than being audited by Microsoft/FAST/Whoever and being found to be using unlicensed software then being charged full retail pricing plus a whacking great fine"

Worked on my management but admittedly we use a Select agreement so once we pay for a licence it's ours for ever.

[plexer]

If no money was spent before you started then they must have been unlicensed.

Ben

[DMcCoy]

Do you mean 9k to 17k? As for 90k you should be able to license 3500+ machines and lots of servers! SQL connections aren't covered, but you can get cheap per processor licenses that don't need CALs under Schools Agreement

[limbo]

We have a schools agreement and have had for four years.

When we first looked at it the costs of three years of the agreement was cheaper than a one off purchase of the XP and Office 2003 licenses we wanted. With Microsoft promising to upgrade software every three years it seemed to make financial sense.

I am guessing that the increased costs is because of considerably increased machines - the individual license cost for each machine has dropped considerably over the last four years.

I would go back and look at how many extra machines you have since the original agreement and then work out how much it would have cost for the software and any upgrades since and put that figure under their nose. It will probably be cheaper and certainly less administrative time which is always a forgotten cost.

You also need to remind them that Office 2007 is now available (got the CD pack yesterday!) and you can upgrade to that as soon as you want to where most schools will have to fork out cash first.