Microsoft Licensing

[KWestos]

What's he best way to license MS products in Schools - is it still the School's agreement every year. Or should we look into the select agreement, which usually works out the best/cheapest.

[kmount]

About now I'd suggest banging your head off a wall a couple of times as it might make MS licensing more straight forward!

 

IMHO (and I'm FAR from knowledgeable on this subject) if you're going for a complete overhaul for all of your systems (ie, a large move from XP > Vista & up to Office 2007) it would work out cheaper and probably saner to use a Schools Agreement.

 

Our SLT (when we were moving from 98SE > XP & Office 2000 > 2003) rejected our argument for a Schools Agreement and have as a result spent a lot of money on licensing which now will be fairly defunct when we consider the next overhaul.

 

I used a figure of around £27 per unit when I looked at this some 4 years ago and it worked out that at the time the investment would have been £10k per year and over the course of 3 years £30k would have been spent (give or take development ofc) before having to spent more than that for a SELECT style of license upgrades.

 

I'm sure there are plenty of people on here with real world experience who can help you better than I.

 

Good luck, and please do let us know how you get on!

[BatchFile]

This thread may be of some interest:

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/29479-m-academic-licensing-school-agreement-not.html

 

I've decided to stay with it for now - I haven't got time to set up thin clients this year anyway