Adobe Creative suite + costs

[Dos_Box]

How much are you apyign for Adobe Creative Suite 4 for your school? Are you buying per seat or site licences, and what is the most 'minimal' version. We just need Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Dreamweaver really, so if you can recommend a particular version please let me know.

[dgsmith]

Like yourself, we only needed a handful of the programs (dreamweaver and flash for ict, photoshop and indesign for art and graphics). It seems we can make use of a few others as well which is handy and it was cheaper buying the whole lot than bits.

 

It worked out better for us to buy the design premium edition, however we bought it with CS3 and upgraded it for free (CS3 was cheaper than CS4 is now, afaik). Our licence covers us for 500 I think it is, and something likle 50 off-site licences (that's computers, not users).

[Dos_Box]

What did you pay in total?

[DMcCoy]

How much are you apyign for Adobe Creative Suite 4 for your school? Are you buying per seat or site licences, and what is the most 'minimal' version. We just need Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Dreamweaver really, so if you can recommend a particular version please let me know.

 

iirc it was around £5500 for the 500 user license, although this has commercial usage restrictions, and requires another license above 500 machines. You get 50 licenses for staff to use.

 

In terms of what you get, very little. No support, updates are virtually non existent and it is full of bugs and can be quite unstable at times.

[Dos_Box]

I have 40 training room computers and 20 staff I want to get it for. If push comes to shove just Flash would do (I forgot to include that in the list of apps we would use).

[AngryTechnician]

In terms of what you get, very little. No support, updates are virtually non existent and it is full of bugs and can be quite unstable at times.

 

I would second that. Acrobat in particular has a vicious bug that causes it to consistently crash if you redirect AppData to a UNC path. Adobe vainly tried to fix it in 9.1 (which took nearly 6 months to see the light of day) but have now washed their hands of it and officially state they do not support AppData redirection at all.

 

If that doesn't put you off(!), your requirements would lead you towards either the Web Premium or Design Premium packages. They are the same price at all the suppliers I've checked, so it really comes down to the difference between those two packages: with Design Premium you get InDesign, with Web Premium you get Contribute and Soundbooth.

 

We bought a site licence for CS3.3 last year; buying per-seat works out much more expensive, and I think even with your relatively low numbers you will be close to or over the break even point depending on whether you went for concurrent or non-concurrent licensing, even if you just bought Flash. Pugh Computers currently list CS4 site licences at £5,599. When we bought our CS3 licence we went through Softcat who knocked about £500 off of Pugh's price at the time.

[dgsmith]

What did you pay in total?

 

CS3 for £5400 (excluding VAT) and upgraded to CS4 at no extra cost. Did (and still do) have problems assigning it to workstations over the network. Support isn't overly great.

[spc-rocket]

CS3 for £5400 (excluding VAT) and upgraded to CS4 at no extra cost. Did (and still do) have problems assigning it to workstations over the network. Support isn't overly great.

 

 

Hiya,

 

That's interesting because i thought you can't upgrade to the new version free of charge and have to buy the whole product again. We bought the web premium package for our school for CS3 through Ramesys.

 

Can i ask did you pruchase some sort of support contract or something and thus making you eligible for free upgrades?

 

Ash.

[dgsmith]

Adobe were running a scheme for anyone who bought the CS3 product in a specific timeframe, got CS4 for free. We bought CS3 in that timeframe and were eligible. No hidden extras, no hidden costs, all above board.

Of course, this was last year and the scheme has long since ended.

[NEEDS]

Our School recently purchased CS4 Design Premium site liecence. works out that if you were to buy 10-15 copies of the programmes seperately it cost more than a 500 clients site licence. Our Art department and IT departments love it. We purchsed it From Academia Educational Software, Academic Software, Educational software licensing, Training Resources, discounted Student Software, discounted Education Software was about £800 less than what Pugh were advertising it for and it arrived the next day!!

 

With regards to upgrades i belive if you purchsed CS3 in a certain time frame you got free upgrades to CS4. Alternatively you can now take out maintence plans which will provide you 24 months upgrade protection. Works out a lot cheaper than starting all over again