Category: Live at Edu

What Microsoft’s new EES licensing model means for Primary Schools

Posted on by primaryt

Today is the first day of Microsoft’s EES licensing and this has massive implications if your school uses Microsoft Products.

I am not going to cover the student licensing model because I’m relatively confident this model wont fit for most Primary Schools.
The new licensing model we will look at covers Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office licensing.  We are also ignoring Exchange and Sharepoint CALs(CAL Suite).

What does this all mean in real terms?

  1. You pay Microsoft per year for licensing
  2. Teachers can use Microsoft Office at home
  3. An average 2 form entry will be paying for 30 members of staff
  4. Updates to latest versions of products without any extra cost (Software Assurance).

When might EES not be appropriate?

  1. EES may also not be cost effective if you purchase OEM licenses or don’t use Microsoft Office.
  2. EES may not be useful if your school does not have a high quantity of devices (netbooks/laptops) running Microsoft Office.
  3. If your school intends to NOT purchase new hardware or new Microsoft products.
  4. If you don’t want to get into an annual rolling contract with Microsoft due to funding uncertainties or due to a requirement of a grant etc.

Time for some maths…

All of these figures are based on a 2 form entry school buying new Microsoft Office licenses every 5 years.
Standard licensing model:
Cost per office license per machine, £32
Average # of devices with office installed, 80
*Windows License — Excluded because is OEM (Roughly £50 per device)
Average cost every 5 years — £2560
Ergo cost per year on Non EES per device license model — £512

EES:
Average cost per EES Office license per member of staff — £20
Average # of staff members per 2 form entry: 30
Ergo cost per year for office on EES: £600
Ergo cost per year for Windows on EES: £600
Note that I haven’t covered any Server CALS.

To summarize

EES breaks even at roughly 100 devices in a 2 form entry school but the advantage is that staff can use Microsoft Office at home so don’t need their own copy.
It is unlikely EES will be cheaper than OEM as buying a device without windows lately is difficult however XP Pro upgrades are roughly £50 per device so if you buy 15 devices per year then EES Windows Licenses work out better value. A smart hardware manufacturer should see this opportunity and provide OS free hardware so that schools can leverage this new licensing model.

Hopefully someone from Microsoft can respond with some information about CAL licensing and any mistakes in this post. Word on the street is CAL pricing will be staying relatively similar for Server CALS, this pricing isn’t due to be released till May.

I quickly bashed up an EEE license cost calculator so you can see if it’s cost effective for your school to move or not

If you want to know more about EES please get in touch with Primary Technology who will be happy to help.

An unpopular blog post – 7 ways to cut ICT costs

Posted on by John McLear

It is never popular talking about how schools can save money on ICT or areas where spending is just too high.  Sorry if you fall out with me on this one..  These are all suggestions, I don’t endorse any in any way, shape or form (this is mostly for political reasons…).

For the most part you get what you pay for, so any savings may mean a drop in quality and a negative impact on teaching and learning.  The conservative education policy is (we assume) run by people with more knowledge than myself so when they say schools need to spend less on ICT all I do is figure out how..

It is up to you to decide how they will impact your teaching and learning.


1. Printing

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Yep, the ugly ink spewing beast is still costing even the smallest of primary school thousands of pounds every year mostly in toners and ink.  So how can a school save money?

a) Use a managed printing solution to reduce the cost per sheet and to restrict the amount certain users can print.

b) Use on-line collaboration such as email more effectively

c) Encourage parents to get on-line and use an e-newsletter / social networking

2. MIS support

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000

Why is it that one application costs nearly as much to support as the entire network full of applications used on the curriculum side?

a) Change your support provider to a more cost effective option

b) Use e-registration and remove the need to replace that nasty OMR

3. Internet connectivity

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £2000

Internet provision from Becta approved providers usually costs 2 to 4 times that from a local internet provider, this is because they usually bundle educational services into the package and/or tools to collaborative with other schools in your area.

a) Change to a local internet provider offering less bandwidth at reduced rates

4. Backups

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £250

Tape backups are horribly inefficient, unreliable and costly.

a) Use remote backup services

5. AV

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Most schools have now spent up on purchasing interactive classroom stuff, replacement bulbs can cost up to £500 each

a) Maintain your projects by pro actively cleaning filters and performing regular maintenance

6. Software Licensing

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

Microsoft have now released their Office web apps so when you come to purchase new devices you can almost ignore the cost of Microsoft Office licensing.

a) Get familiar with Live @ Edu & Office Web Apps or Google Web Apps

b) Become familiar with the vast array of free web 2 tools for schools

7. Technical support

Potential savings in average 2 form entry school: £500

From personal experience I know a major cost of technical support is the time spent visiting a specific machine.  There are obvious advantages to having an on-site engineer.  Face to face support is still by far the best we have right now but that is because we haven’t really explored the realm of good remote desktop support for our curriculum networks as of yet.

a) Encourage your technical support provider to explore on-demand live remote desktop support and monitoring

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The new Microsoft

Posted on by John McLear

The world has changed and Microsoft is changing with it.

Contrary to popular belief Microsoft is longer is Microsoft the money grabbing beast it used to be.

It’s easy for companies  to try to exploit new revenue streams and to gain investor support but this isn’t about new markets, this is about reducing existing market share or presenting better value in markets that provide a healthy revenue stream for Microsoft.

Microsoft are pro-actively cutting existing revenue streams to aid education, I am involved in this and although it damages our profitability it does increase our ability and potential to provide a better service at a lower price.

Live @ Edu is a perfect example of this.  We purchase thousands of pounds/dollars worth of Microsoft Exchange licenses each month and then resell those on to schools through a service called Primary Email.  The introduction of Live at Edu means we can still sell Primary Email but instead of using our own hosting and having to pay Microsoft for Licenses,  Microsoft cover it all, how nice is that?!

Live at Edu is a free service but because we have worked in Primary schools providing email for so long we are able to offer the 5% extra that makes a big difference to how a school efficiently uses email.  Eventually Microsoft will figure this out and push us entirely out of the market and that is fine, but until that point it give us a great opportunity to offer a great service at a ridiculously low price!

Question is..  How does the Microsoft Exchange team feel about this?  Knowing Microsoft I think they will feel somewhat vulnerable and the thought of merging the Exchange team with the Office team could make for some uncomfortable conversations..

In reality..  Imagine you were payed £20k to do your job then your boss said we can’t pay you any more AND you have to work for free..  But in 10 years time your £20k will be £50k.  I hope this is sustainable for Microsoft, I’m pretty sure it will be and their business model/plan will be widely adopted in other emerging and stale markets.

Finally it is worth saying that past experiences means that we do treat Microsoft with the same treatment we treat  other companies growing at the rate of a steroid infused tuma.  With a very, very, very large pole, muzzle and a poached salmon and rocket sandwich.

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