Site Licences and Remote Access

[36Degrees]

I did find a link to a specific document on Microsoft's website about this but it won't open! I hate MS licensing...

[jmak]

Google apps is a much better option, it syncs with older versions of MSOffice as well as 2013 and has much stronger collaborative features

Better product, agreed. Unfortunately when I tested, I found that some documents prepared in MS Office had formatting discrepancies in Google Docs. Our users have a penchant for borders around their Word documents which seems to cause all kinds of problems. I put loads of arguments together and demos of various free options and all I got back was "it's not Word". As they could always find some pre-existing document which didn't display correctly, I lost. I'm not bitter. Can you tell?

[CyberNerd]

Better product, agreed. Unfortunately when I tested, I found that some documents prepared in MS Office had formatting discrepancies in Google Docs. Our users have a penchant for borders around their Word documents which seems to cause all kinds of problems. I put loads of arguments together and demos of various free options and all I got back was "it's not Word". As they could always find some pre-existing document which didn't display correctly, I lost. I'm not bitter. Can you tell?

It depends how you use it, if your using with MSOffice it stores the documents in MSOffice format so they are identical. Our argument was that 90% of student machines don't have office (and can't ever have office on ipad,android,linux etc - this was backed up by evidence from our VLE) and the cost of using 365 to get the same features means everyone needs office (through RDP) and that ran into 0ver 40k per year - guess who 'won' ?

[jmak]

that ran into 0ver 40k per year - guess who 'won' ?

In our case, either 50% of one year's ICT budget (hardware, software, subscriptions, the lot) for perpetual licences or 15% ongoing for EES subscription (selected as we had already spent more than 50% of the budget). I'd say M$ won. I tried, I really did, but in the end it's not my decision.