Microsoft and schools

House

House

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Hi guys

Do any of you know about Microsoft licensing and schools? Was there a time when schools had received free licenses for Office and/or Windows? Or, did they have to pay for it from the start?
 
House said:
Hi guys

Do any of you know about Microsoft licensing and schools? Was there a time when schools had received free licenses for Office and/or Windows? Or, did they have to pay for it from the start?
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There used to be an MS licensing for schools programme whereby they could get free (I think) MS software but this was in about 2009 so not sure if it is still in effect.
 
They used to have an agreement from 2003 to 2010. Was a contract where the education department signed the contract. School had to buy Windows licences, which gave them free upgrades, as well as access to MS Office Pro for each Windows licence, and a single Windows Server licence overall.
 
They give stuff away for free in order to indoctrinate kids into using MS products so they would buy their stuff in future. Call them and you will get it for free.
 
ponder said:
They give stuff away for free in order to indoctrinate kids into using MS products so they would buy their stuff in future. Call them and you will get it for free.
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Lol! :) I know schools are paying for volume licenses now and they charge by the number of permanent employees and not the number of computers. I was just interested in knowing whether they really gave it away free before.
 
ponder said:
They give stuff away for free in order to indoctrinate kids into using MS products so they would buy their stuff in future. Call them and you will get it for free.
Click to expand...

Computing in schools, including the curriculum should be based on free open source if only so that the software used is available free to all learners.
 
Moving to free OSS is on the cards for many schools. Almost all our services are run on Linux now. Although our desktops still run Windows, we use a lot of free stuff. Java as our programming language, as opposed to Delphi. We've installed gimp, libreOffice, Eclipse, Dia, Xmind, vlc, and a few other packages I can't think of off the top of my head. MS are daft, charging us ridiculous amounts, when the original contract was with the education department. The department failed to notify schools that as of 2010 the contract was ended and not renewed. So a lot of schools carried on as per normal, because at the last renewal, they didn't notify either. So now MS wants to back charge to June 2010 @ R375 per workstation per year, or R45 per user. Works of at about R120k for us, before they will let us sign a new contract for going forward. So we are definitely in line to can MS altogether. The problem lies with the admin packages, such as Pastel, and the admin system, which unfortunately is just an Access database. PITA.
 
I used to work for a National Computer Training College which was Microsoft Accredited,
and they never bought any licenses. All they did was get facilitators to write a Microsoft
product examination like Microsoft word etc. to become a Microsoft Office Specialist and have a Comptia CTT+ certification and register as an Microsoft Certified Trainer which involves a small fee, but you will then have access to 20 or so keys to use on any microsoft product.

Dont know how legal it is or how they got it right, But they have been awarded Microsoft Gold Parter award for 2013.
 
I worked for Education and AFAIK they used to buy licenses.

However this was for the staff at head office and the regional offices, so I don't know about the actual schools
 
graviti said:
Moving to free OSS is on the cards for many schools. Almost all our services are run on Linux now. Although our desktops still run Windows, we use a lot of free stuff. Java as our programming language, as opposed to Delphi. We've installed gimp, libreOffice, Eclipse, Dia, Xmind, vlc, and a few other packages I can't think of off the top of my head. MS are daft, charging us ridiculous amounts, when the original contract was with the education department. The department failed to notify schools that as of 2010 the contract was ended and not renewed. So a lot of schools carried on as per normal, because at the last renewal, they didn't notify either. So now MS wants to back charge to June 2010 @ R375 per workstation per year, or R45 per user. Works of at about R120k for us, before they will let us sign a new contract for going forward. So we are definitely in line to can MS altogether. The problem lies with the admin packages, such as Pastel, and the admin system, which unfortunately is just an Access database. PITA.
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I'm encouraged to hear you describe FOSS making some headway. I have less of an issue with schools buying software like Pastel as it doesn't need to be available to the kids and there is good commercial support available (although there are some quite interesting open source accounting and ERP packages.)

I did once come across at least one open source school management system that might make an alternative your Access DB. Unfortunately I don't recall the name but I'm sure if Google or look on Sourceforge you will turn something up.
 
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