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Has anyone run a thread on which Office software is being used / considered in our schools.
My School is an Emotionally Disturbed Boys (EDB) school for KS3. Till recently Office 2003 has been the bedrock but finding licenses were umh a bit out of kilter we recently signed up for the schools agreement entitling us to Office 2010. Now deployed - howls of protest!!
As with many schools we have a few Apple Mac machines they currently don't have anything other than the Apple software on board.
Our strategic goal is to be able to provide end user apps to students, either via Citrix or the cloud.
After calling around several suppliers, I learned that to allow remote access to MSOffice we would need to have a MS pro license for every single computer that connects to the terminal server. This will cost us around £19,000 per year. As a result of this high cost, and the difficulty between file formats used in school and BYOD/ home user devices the school has now opted for a mix between Google apps (primary) and Libreoffice (essentially OOo3).
Over the course of using Google docs, teachers found that the pedagogical benefits of collaborative working actually outweigh the benefits of higher end office apps in their own right. We now have around 18,000 documents which are stored at zero cost to us.
We *may* buy some MSExcel (not office pro) licenses for SIMS exports as SIMS is artificially locked into Excel (it exports XML, which openoffice can handle, but there is a call out to excel which fails if it isn't installed - Capita won't resolve this)
we have migrated to office 2010 EES agreement, gives us unlimited installes of the KMS version of office pro, unlimited installs of the kms Windows 7 when we upgrade our servers and the teachers get the right to buy office pro 2010 for a very small amount. just nead to count the total number of full time staff each year
so far so good, everyone is getting the hang of it, (got two more machines to go and we are fully swaped over from 2003) and i have set up a moodle self training course for all the staff and students using the documents provided by microsoft.
we have 4 apple imac machines, they are running the newest version of office for mac 2011.
office 2010
One Win7 laptop with Office 2010.
Everything else is XP SP3 with Office 2003 with the first batch due to be replaced by Win 7/ Office 2010 next summer
iWorks, Office 2008 for Mac and Office 2011 for Mac too ...