Hello,
At our last ACEM meeting Casey Niemann from Microsoft presented.
I asked him a couple of questions about MS Office and Star Office and
then some of the Gateway bundles. Asked him if I ought to be
selling some of my Microsoft stock and move it to a more "open
architecture" system. He emailed me some of his responses.
Obviously Casey is paid by Microsoft, but I've found him to be about
as honest as any company rep can be. So for another chapter in
the MS/Star anthology...
Rick
Rick,
If you feel it is appropriate to share this with your technology list serve, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Casey
- The current back to school promotion with Gateway in reference to OfficeXP Standard for Students and Teachers is not in response to Licensing 6.0. Rather Gateway is bundling an additional product on the PC, much like they do with other promotions such as a printer or digital camera.
- OfficeXP Standard is a low cost Office SKU made available to the K12 community of teachers and students for use on their personal machines. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.asp?ID=AEROffice
- License price is only one factor in software's total cost of ownership. Gartner estimates that for the average IT project that the cost of the license is only 3% of the total cost of ownership. In K12 the majority of costs are associated with the implementation, support, and staff development costs. Microsoft provides academic institutions with an average discount of 85% off of commercial licensing. We focus on making products easy to use, implement, and manage, and provide free resources specific to helping teachers implement technology in the classroom. http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=tl and http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.asp?ID=InnovativeTeachers
Regarding Star Office
- Gartner estimates costs of switching to StarOffice are at least $1100 per user--including retraining costs, lost productivity, and difficulties translating StarOffice to and from Microsoft formats.
- Star Office's future is uncertain. Sun's commitment to it unknown. A lack of accountability to StarOffice users by changing file formats and making StarOffice 5.2 files incompatible with 6.0. Long term investment has been questioned since they removed their email and calendaring application from the suite.
- Star Office has no supported solution for the MAC. Limited compatibility with Office causes some formatting and dynamic data links to be lost in file conversion--wasting valuable student and teacher time in reformatting.
- Microsoft's commitment to Office is seen in the many new innovations and functionality that students and teachers are looking for. For example easily creating rich multimedia presentations for web delivery using Microsoft producer, voice recognition technology for alternative input methods, document recovery to prevent lost work and much more. We are also innovating the way we manage curriculum and the traditional class room with Class Server. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/education/
I would encourage you to subscribe
to our TechNet for Education at http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.asp?ID=TechNet If you have questions about
academic licensing in Iowa, please contact Software Plus as they
would be happy to help. The contact info is in the
attachment.
Casey Niemann
Microsoft Education
IA, NE, KS, MO
515-707-8141
www.microsoft.com/education
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Software_Plus_Sales_Representat
Description: MS-Word document
-- Rick Maehl, Technology and Production Supervisor Arrowhead Area Education Agency #5 Instructional Service Center 330 Ave M, VoTech Bldg-Lower Level PO Box 1399, Fort Dodge, Iowa 50501 ph: 515-574-5577 fax: 515-574-5567 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
