Microsoft licensing
As expected, the Adobe licensing deal has been followed by a similar deal for Microsoft licensing. All faculty, staff and students will be eligible to download and install Microsoft Office and Windows 7 (or previous versions back to Windows XP), with installation allowed on any institutionally-owned device, and one personally-owned machine as well. Distribution should be technically easier than it was for Adobe.
A major difference relative to the Adobe deal is that a large percentage of our customers will be affected by this change in licensing. We have huge numbers of down-rev Office versions out there, and a whole bunch of good machines running Windows XP or Vista which we will consider upgrading to Windows 7. Upgrading from Office 2003/2004 to Office 2010/2011 also presents training issues; the interface is different enough that many users are confused when they first try the new versions. For training, Microsoft has decent online tutorials, we have access to web-based training through the UC Learning Center, and there are often MS Office classes taught through CalPACT (though I wasn’t able to find any scheduled right now).
We have the ability to push out Office through Active Directory for Windows machines connected to AD, but the training issue will require us to be careful about how we do that; we don’t want to give everyone a new interface without warning.
For most other configurations, we’ll have to SneakerNet around for Office installs, although we will also be looking to pilot BigFix, the campus’ new patch management system. It may make more sense for us to install BigFix, then use BigFix to install Office, rather than installing Office directly; we’ll be testing that in at least one department. We think that BigFix will reduce our long-term support costs by making this kind of deployment easier in the future.
We’ll be approaching Office upgrades on a department-by-department basis; you’ll be contacted by your LSCR partner to schedule any upgrades needed in your department. If you have immediate needs, feel free to submit a ticket.
We will be recommending upgrading to Windows 7 for some machines currently running XP, and all machines currently running Vista. Those upgrades need to be considered on a case-by-case basis, and they will take some time. We’ll be rolling out a plan to address them over the next few months.
The software is supposed to be available as of January 9. We will start Office installs that week, probably rolling them out over a period of 6-8 weeks.
Feel free to contact me or your support team if you have any questions.
