LGfL adobe offering - is it 'bad deal' for schools ?

[minimoo]

Has anyone explored the adobe / lgfl deal? It's been hard work trying to get answer out of them. So hopefully someone from on here has already looked at this, or maybe @JohnJackson can share a view

 

The initial announce of 120 named users looked like it would be a good deal for a school - '120 free named licenses' would allow for a school to cover some GCSE/AS/A2 Art/Media/Tech classes; or maybe all depending on the size of the school.

 

The school could then, separately outside of the LGfL offering purchase the new shared device licenses to use in their main computer suites for all pupils.

 

So just as a bit of background here - Adobe used to do named / device cloud licenses - and I believe in February scrapped their legacy device licenses. However introduced 'Shared device licensing' which is only available for education. Details of this is on the adobe site @ https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/using/sdl-faq.html

 

The LGfL @ https://static.lgfl.net/LgflNet/downloads/services/adobe/LGfL-Adobe-FAQs.pdf - to say that if you already have adobe console set up, that it won't be possible to get the free licenses on that console, but you will have a seperate adobe console - and presumably would need to have 2 different adobe enterprise ID's ?

 

If that's the case, it looks as though the LGfL have been classed as a business/enterprise by Adobe. If that's the case, given that other large companies have a habit recently of throwing things at education, I wonder at what point by going the LGfL route it's possible that school's will miss out on an educational offer.

 

Whilst I've not kept up with pricing, there was a post a few months ago asking if the LGfL is really worth it - at the edugeek conference where I casually asked what the pricing of connections are these days - i'd expect in London you'd be able to get a dedicated leased line connection of 300/300mbps for ~£4000 a year. Add in filtering solution for 1-2k a year - it does start to look like their could be a significant saving against the LGfL offering.

[JohnJackson]

Thanks guys for asking the question and this may be a lengthy reply so I apologise in advance for that. LGfL's market proposition is a bundle plus a synchronous fibre connection that I'm confident, on a like for like basis, can't be beaten for value for money. LGfL buys for thousands of schools and save millions for schools who have it. Colleagues, can check the key elements of the bundle at www.savings.lgfl.net and I'm delighted to say that £9M of licences (provided to schools free of charge) are currently being consumed across London for Meraki. Intercept X, Adobe Creative Cloud, Server Advance, Malwarebytes, Filtering, , Sophos Anti Virus, Busythings, J2e etc - soon to add a new platform for Audio Networks. Add to that the £11m a year we are now identifying for pupil premiums it is a huge saving or value add for all LGfL schools. Second, as announced at the conference, we are about to upgrade schools at no cost to bandwidths that I'm confident will reshape the broadband network at no additional cost to schools. Third, we now put a platform in that will scale to between 500 MBPS and 1 GBPS allowing upgrades to be made at the flick of a switch. Third, you all know that we provide over 100 curriculum resources. Four, we also provide some big backup capabilities for schools like a SOC and protect schools from DDoS attack. With respect to Adobe we've done a deal that includes training, support and access to lesson plans. The licences we'll be providing will be at Education and not corporate price. I'd have preferred a device licence for the reasons above but the price point - and Adobe are adamant about this - is much more expensive and won't change it. If someone knows anything different please tell me as I have access to the top management team at Adobe and , as always, I'll campaign on behalf of schools to change that. I'll ask we put something on the website so I can point you to the Adobe deal we have, its value add etc. Edited June 14, 2019 by JohnJackson

[JohnJackson]

PS I almost forgot to mention the bit that we provide a team of ex heads, teachers and subject called Inspire that provide well received support to help schools harness IT as part of the bundle. This team is out visiting thousands of schools every year, helping schools with tech and providing CPD on anything from Google to mental health. We provide great resources for prevent , on line safety, maths .... We also win a lot of awards for content ... It may not be so relevant for the tech side but for lots of schools they need that help too ...

[fiza]

I have been looking into this as our school is part of LGfL. We get 120 licences included as part of our LGfL broadband subscription. Additional licences cost £4.89 per named user. This would cost us around £5775 to cover all our 1181 students. Staff would use the 120 licences we already have. If we went for Shared Device Licences (SDL) we would need licences for each device that we want to use Adobe on. For us this would be IT Suites and Art/DT Laptops. This equates to 300 devices. SDL licences come in at £21.60 (have had a quote from a reseller not linked to LGfL). SDL licences for 300 devices would cost us £6480 per year.

 

For us it works out cheaper to stick with the Named Licences. It's more overhead for us in managing it but it is cheaper per year.

[mavhc]

Gets around the min 500 user licences from Adobe directly if you're a small school

[DavidYoung]

Hi @JohnJackson, do you know when we can get our hands on the 120 licenses?

 

This is an interesting thread as I was a bit sceptical when it was announced as user licenses but looking at the costs listed here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/licensing-questions/206875-adobe-cc-license-100-devices.html#post1769055, I can see why. We currently pay around £750pa for 30 licenses.

 

It will be interesting to see how easy it is to add additional named or SDL licenses to the adobe instance we get access to. We would also need to federate it with our own AD and Gsuite.

 

Thanks

David

[fiza]

Hi @JohnJackson, do you know when we can get our hands on the 120 licenses?

 

This is an interesting thread as I was a bit sceptical when it was announced as user licenses but looking at the costs listed here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/licensing-questions/206875-adobe-cc-license-100-devices.html#post1769055, I can see why. We currently pay around £750pa for 30 licenses.

 

It will be interesting to see how easy it is to add additional named or SDL licenses to the adobe instance we get access to. We would also need to federate it with our own AD and Gsuite.

Thanks

David

We were part of the pilot and we federated with our own G Suite accounts without issue. We haven't gone as far as trying to add additional named licences yet as SLT havent decided on funding it yet.

[minimoo]

@DavidYoung - when I spoke to someone about the adobe setup (after starting this thread) - it seems that the we'll be able to do the federation stuff/ ad sync etc, so will be fairly sensible setup; so I think schools will be covered there.

 

The size /setup of the school is going to make a difference here.

 

At the price of £4.89 a pupil (above) and taking our intake and knocking off 120 - licensing all pupils would cost about £6,200. Any staff licenses would be on top - so if licensing all staff would probably add on about 150 users; about £800 so £7,000 per year.

 

In contrast, you can get a device license for around £22.65 (not sure if you can get a cheaper price with more units) - equivalent of about 300 pc's.

 

In particular case, number of students doing gcse or alevel in art/media/technology is around 273 - giving them a free license then a named license for course work would cost £750.

Licensing 3 main computers (so around 90 computers) + the computers ks3 may use in technology (60 computers) - would be around 150 computers * 22.65 i.e. ~£3400.

Licensing all teachers/staff would add about 800;

 

That would come to about £5000 - depending on how you look at it, a reasonable saving on the £7000 going the named route.

 

Obviously, this approach wouldn't allow KS3 students to access the software at home, and licensing all staff is probably quite generous in my example above. However would cover use of adobe by students in classes, and would cover exam pupils in practical having full access to work on coursework both in and out of school

 

 

[ @JohnJackson - fyi]

[keyboards]

Has anyone done this, we've currently got device licenses what is the difference?

 

120 user licenses is that just we can only use it with 120 logins/users?

 

A lot of the adobe stuff is convoluted

[JohnJackson]

Hi everyone. The info on adobe is at http://www.adobe.lgfl.net along with the provisioning process. I'm reviewing the licence position and may come back with a further improvement on the Adobe deal.

[saggu]

As being LGFL school I have applied for Adobe Creative cloud licences and there are some technical issues with verifying Adobe domain which I am waiting to get resolved. We already have few purchased licence and do not want to renew them, (which is due in 2 months time) if LGFL is providing free licences. Hope the technical issue will get resolved sooner than our paid renewal anniversary.

 

Thanks