MS Schools' Agreement - Mixed Bag?

[DMcCoy]

@tarquel: David Moss works in schools and he weighs up the cost of re-training on opensource with the cost of his MS Schools' Agreement (which I personally don't think is a cost effective licensing scheme anyway - £27/year for Office, Windows upgrade and CALs compared to the price you can buy at with Select?)

To me, it just sounded a little one-sided and not much research had gone into the alternatives - can't wait for 'Mr Cutter Project' to read it

£27 for Windows upgrade, Office Professional and all Windows server CALs and Exchange CALS. Downside is that you have to license all machines on site even if they don't run windows, although you are allowed to increase the number of machines during the term which are automatically covered (not servers though). You also get to run the latest version of all the software.

I'm sure we all also know that it is impossible to buy full versions of windows under ANY license scheme, only OEM or full retail. Also that any upgrade inherits the licence that it is upgrading. For example upgrade an oem windows license and that upgrade now becomes oem too - so you can't reuse it or move it.

Predictable cost is also nice. There is more to life than the cheapest option, schools agreement saves me huge amounts of time and effort each year.

[tarquel]

hehe i didnt mean to knock it - i meant by vipers that it has pros and cons

I would love to have it myself at work, though the yearly thing would deem it impossible with our budget you see

Regards
N.

[DMcCoy]

hehe i didnt mean to knock it - i meant by vipers that it has pros and cons

I would love to have it myself at work, though the yearly thing would deem it impossible with our budget you see

Regards
N.

I switched to it due to an 'interesting' previous license setup and after discovering that novell bordermanager licenses were NON-concurrent.

[Ric_]

The reason that I fell that it's a mixed bag is that there is the assumption that your hardware is going to be capable of running the latest MS apps and OS plus the fact that you will want to.

Chances are, when you buy a new PC it will have the latest OS license and buying Office Pro plus CALs will come to about £65 using Select. Plus, if you don't want to use one of the MS products for any reason (for example you decide Groupwise is a better fit for you than Exchange) it's even harder to justify the annual expenditure.

[DMcCoy]

The reason that I fell that it's a mixed bag is that there is the assumption that your hardware is going to be capable of running the latest MS apps and OS plus the fact that you will want to.

Chances are, when you buy a new PC it will have the latest OS license and buying Office Pro plus CALs will come to about £65 using Select. Plus, if you don't want to use one of the MS products for any reason (for example you decide Groupwise is a better fit for you than Exchange) it's even harder to justify the annual expenditure.

You are quite right, it doesn't work for everyone, but nothing in IT ever does

I however have all 2003 servers and XP clients. So for less than 12k a year I get 400 clients, 20 server, 1 exchange enterprise, isa and 2 per processor licence sql servers.

And Windows PE and corp error reporting, and millions of technet cds!

[theshirt]

A nice man from Microsoft heard of our use of Linux following our involvement in the BECTA Total Cost of Ownership survey. We had already decided to move to Server 2003 but hey ho he wanted to come allong and persuade us to move to MS anyway.

He was quite generous and with a minimum application of pressure he aggreed to let us have a limmited number of licences for a variety of MS products as 'sponsorship' for our Specialist Schools Maths and Computing bid which had just been announced. This was back in June, there was some form filling to be done which required some careful negotiating to avoid the Schools Agreement trap.

We have lots of PII and PIII machines still giving reliable service that run Office 2000 on win 98 but would curl up and die with XP or Office 2003.
So schools agreement is not for us.

The nice man did say that 'legacy' PCs running win98 and office 97 could be loaned to pupils with licence intact so we are doing that for kids on Free schoolmeals etc.

Perhaps when getting prices for Licences and MSagreement people should mention that they are considdering OSS alternatives, that may bring the price down; I am told that OO 2.0 has a very servisable Relational database and that was one of the major factors for us leaving OO, when the relational DB was still in the planning stage.

I'm still waiting for the licences from the nice man, he said something about bureaucrats in MS as well as DFES, but we have started using the licences anyway

Ho Hum

[tarquel]

Hope you pointed out to him that although its a great idea - the MS School's Agreement thing - its just not practical with smaller/underfunded [IT budget-wise ] schools, as alot of us have old hardware that our SMT's wont let us chuck because its not xp-able [as it still works] and that we just cant afford a yearly cost each year - even if we do have the latest version of the OS or server OS etc.

Sorry - that was a long point lol

If you speak to him again, suggest that he [or someone else in the same team] joins in on a edugeek conferance next year [preferably one that I'm allowed to go to lol] and gives us a Q&A session or something so we can explain why its just not feasiable for alot of us ....unless they change it.

And if he wouldnt mind bringing us a copy of the Vista beta each out of goodwill too

Cheers
N.

[russdev]

as said to you nath i am due to speak to a ms guy tommrow so will try and see what we can do

Russ