OVS vs Office365 A3 Costs

[ReBoot]

I've seen a few people commenting that going for CSP licensing (Office 365 A3/A5) could be cheaper than an OVS license.

 

I'm interested in Office365 A3 but the pricing appears much higher than OVS.

 

Roughly speaking we have ~25 staff and 150 pupils our OVS license in less than 1K for Windows/Office.

 

Office365 A3 licensing looks to be about £25/annually. For 175 licenses this is over 4K over 4x what we are spending on OVS.

 

Am I missing something here ? I have seen suggestions that for CSP products its only staff that count for licensing costs but after some research this doesn't appear to be the case.

[IT_JB]

The A3 licence works on a ratio of 1:40 faculty to students. For each faculty licence you purchase you are entitled to 40 student licences (which are free).

 

EDIT: Should also say that you have to licence all your teaching staff to qualify, but this is the same for OVS.

Edited February 10, 2021 by IT_JB

[foofighterjim]

The A3 licence works on a ratio of 1:40 faculty to students. For each faculty licence you purchase you are entitled to 40 student licences (which are free).

 

EDIT: Should also say that you have to licence all your teaching staff to qualify, but this is the same for OVS.

 

As it is per user licensing, you need to license all staff who require a login to you Domain / Azure. Plus, in my experience, you'll need a handful more to cover things like maternity cover or creating accounts for new starters before being able to remove the license for the departing member of staff. It can be hard to get the balance right.

[ReBoot]

That makes a bit more sense. I did go on the Office365 educational site which included pricing information and chatted with a MS employee who implied students needed licenses as well as staff.

 

I guess we will also have to continue OVS Windows licensing on top of the Offfice365 products to cover installed operating systems.

 

Thanks for your help. I guess I need to talk to a MS Partner to get accurate costings.

[TechMonkey]

Get tamed license flinger to calculate both options. Ours did some magic as we still needed on site servers, so we had part CSP and part OVS. Worked out cheaper, not by a lot but did mean we had more features.

[StoneGroup_JackW]

Hi @ReBoot, we are a tier 1 Microsoft Partner. if i can help with any licensing query, feel free to drop me a PM or email me at [email protected]. Thanks

[johnlevis]

Looks like I'm late spotting this thread but VeryPC can help untangle this for you as we specialise in education licensing, feel free to get in touch.

 

John Levis | Software and Solutions Specialist

Tel: 0114 321 8609

[email protected]

very-pc.co.uk

[Max_Power]

Are licence partners able to offer cheaper pricing for the actual office 365 A3 licence than what is quoted on the Microsoft site? £2.85 per staff user, per month, +VAT? (£41.04 per year).

That price is more expensive than what we pay for the desktop licence packs and Pro plus education licences etc.

[snagrat]

License partners get between 10-15% discount on the Microsoft price so it depends on the partner what they quote at

[lmrogers]

Quick question. If I was to license all my staff with Microsoft 365 for Faculty, and that entitled me to Microsoft 365 for Students, would I still need an OVS or EES agreement in place for the desktop suite?

[johnlevis]

@Imrogers

 

Microsoft made some changes recently which means you can licence Windows and Office via CSP on both OVS-ES and EES agreements - previously it was only EES which caused some confusion.

 

However you will still need an OVS agreement for the Core Cal Suite, servers etc (Core Cal Suite would be your FTE based qualifying product).

 

It will depend what stage your OVS is at though. Feel free to get in touch if you want to go over this

 

John

 

John Levis | Software and Solutions Specialist

Tel: 0114 321 8609 /option 1

[email protected]

very-pc.co.uk

[KK20]

we looked at pure "office 365" licensing but in the end it was cheaper for us to licence the old style desktop pack with office 2019 and leverage the additional Microsoft 365 Apps for Students/Faculty that goes with it (plus the free A1 basics of course). We licence 95 staff.