School, select, or Open? Which licensing option do you use?

[Rydra]

I've recently started at my new school, and one of the things that has crept up more apparent over the last few weeks, is the state of our licensing, or possibly a better description may be a lack of it, or documentation thereof.

 

I'm in the process of getting quotes and details on the MS agreements, and I'm rather keen to move over to the Schools agreement, but the headteacher got the idea of using Open Office from somewhere, and I suspect when I give her the news of "We are unlicensed for X,Y,Z, and it will cost THIS much every year to correct this" that I will find myself doing a lot of uninstalling, and writing a self installer for Open Office.

 

So here's what I've got to work with:

 

Primary School

3 servers running Server2003 (possibly a 4th coming which will be Server 2008 R2), one of them a SIMS server.

100 devices

600 users (students+staff together)

Mix of Office XP, 2003, and 2007

Mix of XP, Vista, and windows 7 (plus 1 win 95!)

 

NO documentation on CAL's, or number of licenses for each thing.

 

Under the select agreement, the cost of getting a 'uniform' Office suite would be £2-3000, most likely towards the higher end of that. Then there's another £300 in new CAL's, and another £150 in server licenses to get them all up to the same Server OS.

Total: £3,450

To add the Windows licenses to this, adds another £24 per machine, bringing the total to £5,800

And gives us no future proofing, no work from home agreements.

 

The School's agreement which covers the CAL's, the Server OS's, and both Windows and Office, including the HUP and WAH + software assurance is £2300 per year.

 

The 3rd option, would be to dump all our current office packages (save for admin) and move to Open Office, and just go with the server +cal costs on the select agreement, which is definately the 'cheaper' option, but as far as keeping the Students using the same tech as they would be using in High school and beyond, it is a step back 10 years.

 

 

So onto the point of this little thread: I want to get a picture for what 'others' are doing out there, to see if I can argue "All the others are doing THIS, therefore we should" Or if I should succumb to the OO crowd.

 

What are you currently using?

-Schools agreement (annual subscription, with some sort of software assurance/futureproofing/home usage rights)

-Select Agreement (Buy it as and when you need)

-Select + Open source/free solutions

-Something else!

[Mr.Ben]

I'm in the same dilemma at the moment, but I'm swaying to a Schools Agreement

 

We have 120 devices and the select cost for Office + Windows would be just under £10,000 (everything is xp here)

 

Where did you get that quote for the school's agreement? - It seems really low compared to the quotes I have!

[Soulfish]

We're a Secondary with around 450 devices. When I started I was in a very similar position to yourself - little licensing documentation and I could only track down purchase information for about 50% of our licenses.

 

For us it was cheaper to move to a schools agreement then purchase the needed licenses. We also wanted to start to move to Office 2007 + Windows 7 so would have needed to replace the licenses we already had anyway.

 

We also preferred the schools agreement from a budgetary perspective as well as we now have a fairly fixed licensing cost every year.

[wesleyw]

I'm looking at Schools agreement next year as I'm hoping to move everything over to 2010 (Office, Exchange,Sharepoint), 7 and 2008 R2. As for open office have a look at Go Open Office as this is the first OO with the ability to read and write Office 2007 xml files. No ribbon though

 

Wes

[Kitkatninja]

We have a Schools agreement, with SA (and home rights via it).

 

-Ken

[tmcd35]

I've tried going open source as our licensing situation when I started was in about as good a condition as the OP's. We're about to do a u-turn, I think, on the whole OpenOffice thing and I've been researching and drawing up endless spreadsheets to compare Select and Schools Agreements.

 

The Schools Agreement is cheeper year 1 but more expensive come year 3. Spreading the payments over three yeats in a schools agreement only makes sense, at least to us, if you want to a) upgrade to the latest OS + Office as they are released, and b) accept you're paying a slight premium to do so.

 

We've worked out that paying slighly more up front to get our Select licenses up to date and then always buying new licenses and Software Assurance with every new machine we buy after thay will be cheaper long term and allow us, at worst, to upgrade every other OS/Office version.

[Boon72]

i've just got 1 of my schools sorted with 2 server 2008r2 licenses & cal's for under £500 (£55.06ps & £3.70pc) were also looking into a subscription for the licensing, a cost of £26 per unit was mentioned, but a quote is something that involves a final count up

[Ric_]

It's also worth considering some of the additional benefits of Schools Agreement:

* Allows use of latest and greatest

* Allows use of Windows 7 Enterprise (remember only Windows 7 Enterprise gives you Bitlocker, Bitlocker2Go and Direct Access)

* Allows use of Office Enterprise (includes Groove and OneNote on top of Professional)

* Gives you High School AA (Expression Studio, Visual Studio Pro and SQL Server for teaching and learning purposes and you can give copies to the kids for homework assignments) - usally £149 per year

* Technet+ - usually £249 per year

* Home use rights for staff (for T&L)

* Staff can buy super-cheap licenses for Ofice to use for what they like

 

(most of the above is actually a Software Assurance benefit so it is also applicable under SELECT+)

[KeithMPhoenix]

To be honest I dont think its one size fits all - of the schools and LEA's ive seen, every situation tends to be slightly different and indeed many have Schools Agreements and also make use of Select.

[Rydra]

I'm in the same dilemma at the moment, but I'm swaying to a Schools Agreement

 

We have 120 devices and the select cost for Office + Windows would be just under £10,000 (everything is xp here)

 

Where did you get that quote for the school's agreement? - It seems really low compared to the quotes I have!

 

There is a lovely lady at a company called Insight UK ( Deals at Insight UK for public site) who my account manager put me in touch with who seems to know MS licensing inside and out.

 

I looked at the Dell website while speccing up a server, and the Dell costs on CAL licenses was about £23 per computer, whereas I am being quoted between £1 and £3.20 per computer...

 

Obviously prices will vary from site to site, and seller to seller, but I've been seeing about the £10 mark per PC for windows, and about £12 for office, and the costs on the Select agreement are about about 2.3 times the cost of the Schools Agreement (aka, the cost of buying your licenses outright is 2.3 years equivalent to the School's agreement). So 10,000 is just a TAD over price!

[enjay]

We currently licence the OS with OEM licences bought at time of purchase; Office licences were bought on Select. Typically, we've run Office a version behind the latest due mostly to the cost of re-licensing. When we come to move to Win7 and/or Office 2010, I think I will take out a Schools Agreement as it will be cheaper than buying them outright, is a known expenditure so makes the accountant happy, and means we can upgrade without a massive capital outlay.

[pete]

Last time we reviewed (Office purchase) we stuck with Select because it was cheaper to buy outright unless we were planning to upgrade office suites every 2 1/2 years.

[daz191]

We use the Schools Agreement and it really does take all the hard work out of licensing.

 

Last year we licensed 573 PC's for about £12,500, as it's an annual cost it's easy to budget for.

 

The only downside is having to pay for 'all' computers, including MAC's or those that have been purchased with an OEM license of the latest software included.

[tmcd35]

We currently licence the OS with OEM licences bought at time of purchase;

 

It's worth pointing out that by doing this you can't (or shouldn't) use images (ghost/fog/wds/etc) to roll out your machines. Imaging OEM copies would have activiation problems and using you are not supposed to use make an image using Volume License media without paying for the Select/Schools volume license for those machines.

 

 

The only downside is having to pay for 'all' computers, including MAC's or those that have been purchased with an OEM license of the latest software included.

 

AFAIK both Select and Schools agreements are upgrade only products for client OS's. This means you must buy machine with an OEM license to use the select/schools agreement licenses.

[Ric_]

The great Mr Fleming has just blogged about licensing options... Microsoft UK Schools : It makes sense to review the way you buy software ? it might save money

[john]

The great Mr Fleming has just blogged about licensing options... Microsoft UK Schools : It makes sense to review the way you buy software ? it might save money

Anyone would think he had been reading Edugeek

 

Another good blog article from Mr Fleming

[Gatt]

Currently we use Schools Agreement with AS/HUP, etc which works really well for us

But RM want us to purchase their RMSelect agreement which seems very costly (££ for Windows, ££for Office, and more ££ for each CAL - all per PC.. - at present Schools Agreement has this all included - for less!

[Cmd.exe]

I am trying to make a decision about this right now!

We have been licenced under Select with perpetual licences. We now want to move from XP to 7 and 2003 office to 2007/2010 as well as 2008 server and new cals.

 

The rough cost to buy again under select would be £60K!

For schools agreement it's around £18K a year.

The schools agreement is a lovely way to manage the money by having an annual cost and is very attractive for this.

 

However, we are also considering running a student netbook scheme (1:1 access) and the cost of licencing this under SA is prohibitive as you have to have licence evey computer in your school under SA even if you already have a licence for them.

 

At the moment i am investigating leasing the cost of a select licence purchase.

[rayfleming]

Anyone would think he had been reading Edugeek

 

As it happens, I hadn't (at that particular time) but I do follow along when I get the chance (not much in the last month, as I've been away from the office for 'conference season' - Harrogate for UCISA, Blackpool for NAACE, and London for the FE Day. Oh, the glamour of travel

Anyway, back to the subject in hand.

 

If you have got Office 2003 Select licences, and you're considering a School Agreement, then make sure that you mention to your EdLAR the "Upgrade The Desktop" offer, as that may save you some money (at the moment)

 

As ever, unsure about whether this counts as inappropriate advertising, so I'll stop there. And go on holiday before you all fill up the foreign shores during the Easter hols.

[u8dmtm]

To add the Windows licenses to this, adds another £24 per machine, bringing the total to £5,800

And gives us no future proofing, no work from home agreements.

 

The School's agreement which covers the CAL's, the Server OS's, and both Windows and Office, including the HUP and WAH + software assurance is £2300 per year.

 

Based on those figures you would have to expect to replace every Select licence every 2.5 years or more frequently to make Schools agreeement cheaper. In other words, If you buy Select licences now then unless you plan to upgrade EVERYTHING again before Autumn 2012 then Schools agreement is more expensive for you.

 

If you then factor in that most new PCs you will buy will come with OEM OS licences, which won't need upgrading in 2.5 years time then under Select it is far cheaper.

[Ric_]

Based on those figures you would have to expect to replace every Select licence every 2.5 years or more frequently to make Schools agreeement cheaper. In other words, If you buy Select licences now then unless you plan to upgrade EVERYTHING again before Autumn 2012 then Schools agreement is more expensive for you.

 

This is usually the case with Schools Agreement but it's an 'apples and oranges' comparison. As has been mentioned previously, the Schools Agreement gives additional benefits. A closer comparison would be Select with Software Assurance which would then give you many of the Schools Agreement benefits although still not all of them.

[u8dmtm]

The issue I have with the so called 'Additional Benefits' of Schools Agreement over Select which is rolled out every time a salesman wants you to sign up to Schools Agreement is that they are often a mix of the intangible (such as always having the newest shiniest version) or are arguably outside the remit of the school (such as allowing teachers to use it free at home / very cheap home licencing).

 

If your aim is to be licence compliant for the lifetime of an MS software title for the least amount of money then I can't see Schools being more cost effective than Select in all but a very few situations. The rest is little more than a smokescreen.

[Soulfish]

The issue I have with the so called 'Additional Benefits' of Schools Agreement over Select which is rolled out every time a salesman wants you to sign up to Schools Agreement is that they are often a mix of the intangible (such as always having the newest shiniest version) or are arguably outside the remit of the school (such as allowing teachers to use it free at home / very cheap home licencing).

 

If your aim is to be licence compliant for the lifetime of an MS software title for the least amount of money then I can't see Schools being more cost effective than Select in all but a very few situations. The rest is little more than a smokescreen.

 

For us we went for a schools agreement because it's not just about the price. As Ray points out on his blog a set yearly cost is much more preferable to an accountant/business manager than a large random spike in expenditure every x years. For us it also massively simplifies license management.

 

Being able to say that MS licenses cost us £xk per year is much preferred to saying MS licenses may cost us £xxk in 3-5 years dependant upon a number of factors. Being able to spread the license costs over multiple years is always nice - after all schools aren't really allowed to roll budgets on from year to year!

[u8dmtm]

For us we went for a schools agreement because it's not just about the price. As Ray points out on his blog a set yearly cost is much more preferable to an accountant/business manager than a large random spike in expenditure every x years. For us it also massively simplifies license management.

 

Being able to say that MS licenses cost us £xk per year is much preferred to saying MS licenses may cost us £xxk in 3-5 years dependant upon a number of factors. Being able to spread the license costs over multiple years is always nice - after all schools aren't really allowed to roll budgets on from year to year!

 

Who plans ICT Provision on a 1 year budget though? I disagree that it is a 'random spike' and if by 'spreading the cost' you mean essentially leasing the right to use the software but at a higher total cost of 'ownership' then you may be more accurate. Finally, as you say, schools aren't really allowed to roll budgets on and equally they cannot neccessarily always project their future budgets, especially when rising manpower and fuel costs are taken into consideration. For that reason, and the fact that it is mathematically almost always cheaper to go Select I prefer the certainty that we own the right to have OS's Office etc. until we want/can afford to replace them instead of being trapped in a never ending leasing cycle.

[tmcd35]

We haven't long looked at this and for us the Schools Agreement worked out more expensive. I think schools came out at around £85k over 6 years (£12.4 per year) and Select with SA came out around £61k.

 

This was based on bulk buying new licences now to bring us up to the Win7/Off'10 level and then buying new Windows and Office licenses + SA with every new PC we purchase after that. The plan being overtime we'll replace enough PC's to reach critical mass and have enough licenses to move up to the next versions.

 

I think I worked it out to take 6 years for the first upgrade and then every 3 years after that. Assuming new versions are released every 3 years. We'd then always be running 1 Windows/Office version behind current. Which I think is acceptable.

 

Over 3 years the schools agreement may be cheaper or there may not be a lot in it, but looking longer term I can't see how any of the perceived benefits can be worth the accumalted £20k price difference.

 

Buy adding new licenese purchases in with new PC purchases we have effectively flattened out our annual expenditure in a similar way to the schools agreement, so no lumpy budget. And I think we end up at around £4-5k per year on going instead of £12k

 

But this is just one schools example. Other schools will obviously have differet priorities and needs so their figures and which is best for them would obviously be different.