GrahamPayton

Thanks again to everybody here for your views and ideas. I got clarification from the Apple Education team today that they cannot do anything about Volume Licensing on OSX Lion for me. I simply have to wait for Mountain Lion now. They also don't see the problem with going straight to Mountain Lion as, according to them, whatever Apple hardware runs Lion will also run Mountain Lion and there will be no problems with the Mountain Lion OSX. Apple are going to get one of their engineers to ring me when Mountain Lion comes out to discuss any issues I might have with running it straight after release as they can't see why I am so against the idea. I have explained to them, time and again, that we simply cannot risk just going straight to Mountain Lion without any testing of software or training for the staff. On top of that they can't tell me "exactly when" in July I will be able to purchase the licenses. They fail to understand that colleges and universities only have a very small window of opportunity to get things like this done over the summer holidays and workng for the start of the next academic year. To be honest this just shows a total and utter lack of understanding of the enterprise environment on their part. The best bit is that our establishment is a case study on the Apple website! Now I wonder what I might say to anyone who rings up in the future ..... In total contrast Microsoft are looking for early adopters for Windows 8. From what I was told they will cover all software costs and even send in their own engineers, free of charge, to help get everything running smoothly. I was approached by a hardware vendor to ask if we would be interested in taking part. I of course replied "YES!"

Than you very much to everyone for the replies. It's a bit easier to stomach knowing that I'm not the only one having to wade through all of this. I get the point about rolling out the Lion desktop from just one installer. But what about the OSX servers? Don't I need separate keys for each of them? I thought if I re-used a key, and it was connected to the internet, then the original server would be deactivated

I can understand what people are saying about going straight to Mountain Lion. The trouble is we don't want to. Apple are notorius for things not working and we haven't had time to test it. We have been testing Lion, but didn't want to buy the licenses until we knew we were ready to switch. I can't believe I missed Apples cut off date by 5 days!!!!! And there was no warning I saw anywhere, or even a call from our Apple Rep. I was told that if I had a single install disc for Lion I could just install that everywhere. I was dumbfounded by this statement. When I asked if the Mountain Lion licenses would then allow me to downgrade to Lion they clearly said that "No that wasn't allowed!". However they then went on to advise me to do just that!!!!! I raised the obvious question about "So what happens if the software police come and do an audit then?" Funnily enough they went a bit quiet. It seems to me like Apple don't really care about the enterprise and volume license areas like colleges and Universities anymore. It's like they are making too much money from the home users now with iPads and iPods etc. Currently we have 9 x servers and approx 400 x Mac clients, and we are totally screwed unless we wait for Mountain Lion. Even then we won't have enough time over the summer holidays left to do a roll-out!

Sorry for choosing the wrong forum area. Synack I'd dearly love to do that with Windows 7 and get rid of them all. Would be simple enough with our campus agreement. We were going to dual boot them all with Lion and Windows 7. I cannot believe Apple have stopped selling licenses before the new version is available.

Hi All I am hoping someone here might be able to help. We were hoping to upgrade all our Macs to OSX Lion this summer, but when I went to order the licenses I was told that Apple have stopped the sale of Volume licenses with software assurance. I rung Apple to clarify this and they confirmed it. To my utter astonishment all they could say was "Buy the Mountain Lion Licenses in July". We don't really want to do this as we feel we can't trust a brand new released Apple OS on our entire campus. We have a mixed estate of OSX Leopard and OSX Snow Leopard. Sadly we never purchased any software assurance, which I am trying to rectify now. Is anyone else stuck with this problem, and if so how are you intending to proceed?

Hi All First new thread here as a member so please be gentle. We have a classroom of 24 PCs we are using for CAD. They are Core 2 Duo machines with 4GB of RAM and running Windows 7 32bit. A nice spec to be fair. I have managed to get all our CAD software upgraded for some fantastic pricing over the summer so we will be running: Solid Edge ST4, SolidWorks 2011-2012, and AutoCad Build and Design Suite 2012. Only trouble is all the old versions were really old and running on Windows XP, AutoCAD was 2006! There are no actual video cards in these PCs at all. They have Intel DG33BU or Intel DG965SS motherboards and are using the onboard VGA. So yes they now run all the new CAD stuff pitifully slowly. Obviously I need a video card that works with all 3 packages but the normal workstation cards like the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 is around £350 per card. The NVIDIA Quadro 600 is still about £150 per card. So does anyone know of any cheaper "mainstream" cards that would do the job well with these packages and Windows 7? I am guessing anything would be better than the onboard VGA as it will have it's own RAM for a start Many thanks in advance Graham

I got well and truly told off for missing one of these "Amazing Savings" offers just the other week by senior management. When I managed to get a word in I pointed out that for £200 per unit less, and a better spec, I had been trying to get them to order new PCs from Dell for the last month.