EES license

[Arthur]

if you were to try and use kms to activate those machines it would fail as the wouldn't have the oem os flag set in the bios.

I don't think that's true, because royalty OEM machines (PCs which have a SLIC table in their BIOSs) are activated with an OEM-specific product key and a corresponding XRM-MS certificate. Windows 7 Enterprise on the other-hand simply uses a KMS key to activate.

[witch]

I'm getting confused, let's start again from the beginning

 

You already have Win7 and Office 2010 licences bought under an Academic Select agreement held by your LEA? The LEA agreement has ended and they are not renewing it? You are an LEA maintained school?

 

If all that is correct, forget EES. You are already licensed. So long as you remain an LEA maintained school then the licenses you have already bought will remain in effect. All that has changed is you can not buy additional licences through your LEA. .

I realised that the licences I have will stay in effect. I didnt explain very well about the server - we have a 2008R2 server all licenced and working so I wont need to upgrade it for a bit.

What I dont understand is the LEA licence bit. If they had an academic select licence - and I wasnt aware of this as I buy direct from Civica (not through the LEA) and Civica never mentioned it until yesterday- and this agreement has ended, do I set up my own academic select licence agreement or what? Will it cost me more money per licence?

I did think that in my current position, EES isnt worth it in either of my schools, not until we want to upgrade the lot.

[tmcd35]

What I dont understand is the LEA licence bit. If they had an academic select licence - and I wasnt aware of this as I buy direct from Civica (not through the LEA) and Civica never mentioned it until yesterday- and this agreement has ended, do I set up my own academic select licence agreement or what? Will it cost me more money per licence?

 

Sounds like your LEA had their Master Agreement held with Civica, like ours do with Phoenix. Since your an LEA school Civica automatically included your licences on the LEA Master Agreement. Yes you will need to sign a new licence agree with Civica (or someone else) when you are ready to buy additional licenses. Yes the licenses will cost you more since you will not have the combined buying power of the LEA.

 

It may be worth talking to a number of local schools who surely must be in the same position and finding out if you can obtain a new Master Agreement as a consortium. Your combined buying power should open up some cheaper prices.

[CyberNerd]

microsoft volume licensing has always provided an upgrade os for desktop and not a full version. this is nothing new to ees,.

yes, it is often better to buy them under select - which is my point.

 

you don't need to pay more for machines without a license in fact if you were to try and use kms to activate those machines it would fail as the wouldn't have the oem os flag set in the bios.

You can activate OEM machines using VAMT. We build a base image from an OEM machine and then image that onto others of the same make and they activate fine using the OEM key.

 

EES isn't a silver bullet and you can often end up paying more than you would with perpetual licensing. It definately hasn't been worth it at our school and we have saved thousands by using perpetual licenses.

[GrumbleDook]

With regards to LAs and Select Agreements it is also worth looking at this thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/licensing-questions/102302-microsoft-select-agreement-not-signed-department-education.html for more information. A number of LAs have allowed Select agreements to come to their natural end as more schools operate outside of LA control / responsibility. There will be alternative options available for schools wishing to stay with Select. I would advise talking with the existing Select provider for your school if anyone has more questions.

[synaesthesia]

I still don't get why anyone pays 1000's for antivirus, when there are perfectly good free clients available! Managed anti virus is such a con.

 

Only one I know of is Panda. I've used it in a school as a stopgap but especially in secondaries I don't believe it's worth risking unmanaged AV. How would you know you've had an infection somewhere, out of several hundred workstations? The first warning you might get from your management point relating to the first infected station a) could save your entire network b) gives you a starting place and a likely source of infection c) due to point b gives you someone to educate or something to fix d) centrally watch your entire network's protection.

Otherwise, let's take a typical modern infection. It gets onto a single PC in a room you rarely go to. It disables the AV protection so no warnings come up for the user. By the time the next user has called to say they're getting a lot of strange popups or you remote in to find 25 copies of Babylon Toolbar on the machine, it's already spread to anything it can connect to. Within half an hour you've got half a school to re-image and a lot of downtime to explain to SLT. The machines can be locked down to high-heaven but when it hijacks a system process no locking down will have any effect on it. I don't even agree with the idea of some management companies who provide free AV as part of their MIS deals (yes, Capita - at least in Northants anyway, you get McAfee for any station with SIMS on including server - entirely unmanaged)

Tell me that's not worth a managed package? And again with EES you're 95% of the way to a full license for SCCM and it's management properties.

Even if you don't - thousands on a package? £1.50 per station typically. OK it adds up for a lot of stations but again it shows you can get value for money from EES. In the majority of cases it really isn't worth the risk. I've seen what damage a simple virus can do to a school and I've been personally responsible for a cleanup solution used across this county. It's not worth it.

 

 

As for licensing in general it's always worth doing *all* the math. Your school might not be in a financial position to go for a subscription based licensing scheme but there's lots you can do to keep costs down. If you've only 50 stations and they've recently been bought so are up to date, perhaps "open" office solutions (I say that as I wouldn't really recommend OpenOffice) and free/already provided email solutions could save a couple of grand. Even so, "all the math" includes the time and cost of the people running it all.

Edited October 16, 2012 by synaesthesia

[andypitts]

I've just had a quote for Windows Server 2012 licenses under our existing EES agreement:

 

WinSvrStd 2012 SNGL MVL 2Proc = 171.60

WinSvrDataCtr 2012 SNGL MVL 2Proc = 921.60

 

A couple of the posts in this thread have suggested prices for the Standard edition of £30 to £90, nowhere near £170...

 

I originally asked for a quote from another provider but they told me that I need to buy these Server licenses from the provider of our existing EES agreement. How do these prices compare to quotes that people here have received? I'd like to go back and ask why the price is so high but thought I'd check on here first.

 

Thanks

[tmcd35]

That really doesn't look like EES pricing! Last quote I got was about £30 for standard and £170 for Datacenter. I also asked for a Academic Select Quote and got £100 Standard and £530 Data Center. They look suspiciously like standard select agreement licences that commercial customers might pay. And so does the descriptions.

 

I got "OVS-ES Windows Server Standard" (£30) or "Windows Server Standard 2012 Single Licence 2 Processor - Academic - Volume License" (£100)

[andypitts]

Thanks @tmcd35 I've queried the quote now and will wait to hear from them. Hopefully this was just a mistake with the agreement type like you said.

[andypitts]

You were right, those were prices were for a Select agreement. The EES quote came back at £30. Thanks again

[OverWorked]

How are servers included under EES? Are they based on the number of FTe staff or number of servers? And do we have to include all servers or just the ones I want to upgrade?

 

We already have EES for clients (OS & Office). Now I want to begin upgrading servers to 2012, but don't know whwether to sary on with perputual licenseing or go to EES. I've been quoted:-

 

Pertpetual Select Plus - WinSvrStd 2012 SNGL MVL: £98

Subscription OVS-ES - WinSvrStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1y Acdmc AP 2Proc: £27 / year

[localzuk]

With servers, you just specify the number of server licenses you need - like you did with the Schools Agreement. You include what you will be installing Windows Server on. If you already have licenses for servers, you don't need to get licenses for them as far as I know!

[OverWorked]

That's great! So I can just cover the servers I need upgrading to 2012.

 

I have a few legacy servers running 2003 that aren't worth spending time and money on.