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I have a friend who works at a school that has licensed the Education Desktop with Core CALS for the last 2 years. Its near renewal time and I'm wondering if it could be done cheaper. Currently they license 20 Education Desktop with Core cal's and use Windows Upgrade Office including the buy at home option Forefront protection Office 365 for email Windows CAL Is it possible to license just Windows upgrade Office including buy at home option Windows CAL Forefront Protection on EES and therefor save the school money. Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi everyone, I have been trying to work out the best licensing approach for our school. I arrived at my current school to discover all the licensing in complete disarray (they expired last August) and the RM CC4 environment on its knees, accompanied by an RM abandoned Office 365 project. As a result, I have had no choice than to sever ties with RM as the account management has been pretty poor and they seemed fairly disinterested in doing much to save the relationship. So, I am currently on the market for a new licensing partner, but need to pull together costs for server and cal licensing for the school asap as we need to implement a new server environment to replace the Server 2003 CC4 environment. We have 600 fte's and 700 PCs. I need to license the following, but am confused about CALs and whether EES represents value for money for us based on our ftes v device count: 4 x Windows Server 2012 R2 DataCenter Licenses 1 Yr 5 x SQL Server Enterprise 1Yr 4 x Windows System Center 2012 Datacenter We have managed to implement office 365, so have got E1 Faculty/Student licensing. We would also like to implement MDOP at the same time as SCCM to help us deliver UE-V and App-V but again, I have no idea how this is licensed and am struggling under the barrage of url links in the microsoft pages to make sense of it all! Anyone here know anything about licensing these environments that can point me in the right direction?!? Thanks

Yet another question on this board's favourite topic. I am interested in whether people think the benefits of EES of being able to keep your software up to date and consistent are worth the lock in, if there is not a significant cost saving. As a small primary school, with a relatively high ratio of FTEs to computers, EES is not nearly as favourable financially to us as to some. However we will be needing Office 2010 licenses for nearly all our computers and upgrades to Windows Pro from Home on a new batch of computers. With EES we could switch Anti-virus from Symantec to Forefront Endpoint Protection. We could also save a bit on being able to upgrade a few computers to Windows 7 and keep them going a bit longer, when it would not be cost effective to do so if we had to buy Windows 7 licenses. In my estimates, all this adds up to EES giving us a slight saving over the next five years, nothing that significant. The real boon of EES would be the ability to upgrade the whole school to Windows 8 and Office 2012 whenever we felt the time was right rather than waiting for a hardware refresh - though I have to say the direction Windows 8 seems to be going does not make me think we will be early adopters. It would also be good to avoid the license accounting: our license records are not very good at the moment. Getting enterprise editions would be nice too - though I've not got anything to bitlocker at the moment. However the lock in of the hefty EES buyout cost gives me cold feet. Anyone any thoughts?

Hi All I have been looking at getting EES agreement for our school. I have received quotes from few different suppliers and no one seems to know how it works exactly. Almost all of them have given me different options with even different SKUs. Would someone be able to give me the SKUs for what we need so that I can make sure that we are buying the right items. Here is what we need: Microsoft Desktop Education with Enterprise CAL Suite 1x Exchange Server 1x SQL Server 45x SQL Server CALs 300x SQL Server CALs 20x Windows Server for 2 hosts P.S- We are located in Australia so it will be good if someone can recommend a supplier as well.

Quick question: The new MS EES is costed per FTE staff, not computers. Does this mean that we can have any number of virtual machines with Win 7 + Office 2010 at virtually no cost? I hope I'm right.

Just giving you all a heads up for those on the BGFL EES agreement all 7000 activation keys have been used up! I've logged a call with LInk2ICT, when you try activating your windows 7 get an error code 0xC004C020 "The activation server reported that the Multiple Activation Key has exceeded its limit." Steve

Our MS licensing is due this month so I received a reminder from our reseller. I thought of doing the usual stuff which is to just calculate the FTE numbers but then noticed that it looks different this time. After reading it carefully, I realised that the server products are not included in the base license anymore and you have to pay extra for them. This almost doubles the price for us and will be more than double for many other schools depending upon what they have installed. I have gone back to our reseller and have been told that we do not have a choice as they have already tried to negotiate with MS three times without any success. Moreover, I have been told that it is a global increase so I assume school in all parts of the world are affected by this. I have also looked at the outright purchase option but this is going to cost a fortune and being a small school we can not afford to do so. I believe it is ridiculous how MS have decided to suddenly increase its licensing costs without any notice at all. Since last year, I have been reading about MS increasing prices for others but did not expect it coming to us. I think they are trying to cover the Windows 8(and free Windows 10 upgrade) losses which is not justified. This looks like a bait and switch to me as they gave us unlimited licenses for most server products and then once schools started using them thinking they do not cost anything extra, MS wants money for it now. Fortunately, I did not go too far with this and have only setup exchange with the enterprise license which I will change to standard now but I believe with some of the other products you can not go back. I almost started loving MS this time but they just do not deserve it. I would like to know if this has happened to schools in other countries as well and how much your ICT budget will be affected by this.

How do I sell MS Office to students through the Student Option? My supplier are no help! They just say that I can set it up throught the VLSC without involving them - but I can't! I've set up a Dreamspark webstore and can distribute free software to students. I've also set up the Staff HUP where staff can buy Office. I have an EES license. I thought the simplest way would be to just add the Student Option to the Dreamspark Webstore, but nothing here is simple. How does everyone else do this?