February 2000
Volume 3, Issue 2

Inside this Issue...

Social Science Computing Laboratory
Faculty of Social Science
Room 1228, Social Science Centre
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada, N6A 5C2

E-mail: ssts@uwo.ca
Web: www.ssc.uwo.ca
Phone: 519 661-2152
Managing Editor: Ramona Fudge

SSC Network Update

Microsoft Campus Site License Agreement

Les Flodrowski

Over the last few years, the cost of keeping up with software upgrades has become a major concern to this and other faculties across campus. In order to reduce total licensing costs, especially in student labs, ITS has been investigating a licensing programme from Microsoft known as the Campus Agreement. The agreement provides faculties and departments with the flexibility and simplicity of licensing people instead of machines. As a result, the programme affords some notable benefits:

faculty and staff covered by the agreement will be able to run the most current version of licensed software both at work and at home;
the agreement provides an easy way to ensure that all machines are compliant with licensing regulations;
student labs are included in the agreement allowing the most recent versions of licensed software to be installed without additional cost;
renewal is on a yearly basis with annual payment covering all Microsoft software included in the programme;

The Microsoft programme includes the most current versions of the following products:

MS Windows Upgrades (including Windows 2000 and beyond)
MSOffice - Standard & Professional Editions
MSOffice - Macintosh Edition
MS BackOffice Server Client Access License (CAL)
MS FrontPage (Web Publishing Software)
MS Project
MS Visual Studio Professional Edition (Programming and development software)
MS Office Starts Here/Step by Step Interactive by Microsoft Press
MS Windows 98 Starts Here by MS Press
MS Windows NT Workstation Starts Here by Microsoft Press
MS Web Publishing Step by Step Interactive by Microsoft Press

The Faculty of Social Science has made a commitment to ITS in support of the agreement effective May 1, 2000. There is currently enough support from other faculties across campus to meet the minimum requirements for adoption of the programme beginning in the new budget year. Final implementation, however, may be contingent on pricing for Windows 2000 (to be released February 17th), a revision to the Campus Agreement that is expected this spring, and exploring opportunities with other universities to obtain a national programme. SSCL will provide departments with final details concerning the agreement once/if it becomes official this spring.