Don’t miss the boat – Office for £38.95 is ending soon
If this is your last year at Uni or College, don’t miss out on this special students-only deal on Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for only £38.95. You can only get it at www.theultimatesteal.co.uk and only while you’ve got a valid .ac email address. So before you leave and lose your .ac.uk email address get online and get genuine non-pirate software you can trust. You’re going to need reliable and genuine software for those times you bring work home, and you might as well make it the latest versions.
You have to be quick as this price is ending on 30th June 2009 and you’ll hate yourself if you miss out.
Look at what you get: the latest Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook as well as Publisher, Access, Groove and OneNote. At £38.95, that’s 90% off estimated retail price. But you’ve got to have a student or faculty email address with a .ac.uk domain from a UK higher education institution.
For only £40.95 you can get Microsoft Vista Ultimate Red Upgrade and feel good that you’ve made an impact on the treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa. You’ll be helping make treatment available because Microsoft will contribute US$10 (about £7) to the Global Fund to help fight HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Every US$50 (about £35) could buy 416 single dose treatments that help prevent transmission of HIV from mother to baby.
So if you’re a student on the sidelines without the latest software grab a deal and feel good about yourself by upgrading with Vista RED Upgrade. To get this price for Microsoft Vista Ultimate Red Upgrade you have to go to www.theultimatesteal.co.uk.
A common question I’m asked and one I’m always happy to answer. There is also this video on YouTube. It neatly summarises the problems faced by IT departments with changing business needs and provides some insight as to how to strike the right balance. Additionally, it contrasts SaaS with S+S and helps to illustrate how an S+S strategy brings benefits to all parties in the solution. It’s about choice.
For more detail on this, we have this link which demonstrates a S+S solution for providing a strategic communication platform for your institution
http://www.microsoft.com/online/demo/v2/demo.aspx
Exams have just finished (well, they have at Oxford, because it was on my local TV news station, who can’t resist shots of people in gowns with beaming smiles). The wind down for the summer has hopefully started for some. But for many IT people in universities, it marks the beginning of planning for the next academic year, and the thinking on how your IT services will be developed for your users. So I thought this week might be a good time to share some training/planning resources for Windows 7 with you. I’ve watched a batch recently, and have been very impressed with the way that they explain the principles first, and the need for some of the new features, rather than just jumping straight into the usual “How to do it…” mode
The Microsoft Learning team have created a series of “Learning Snacks” – 15 – 30 minute videos – which talk through parts of Windows 7, and describe how to manage some of the new features. I know that plenty of you have downloaded and installed the Windows 7 beta onto a laptop, and these resources are just as useful whether you are one of those (gives some hints on what features are worth exploring a bit more), or if you haven’t yet tried it, but want to understand what it might be able to do to grapple with common IT challenges that education faces.
Today we’ll start with the introduction, which provides an overview of technologies that improve performance, reliability, security, and compatibility. And it also takes a look at how it may help reduce “operating cost” (does that mean giving you a bit more time to do the fun stuff, rather than rushing to desktops around campus fixing things?)
We both know that although our users are very sensible people, sometimes they do incredibly dumb things with their computers. It can be caused by ignorance, or it can be because they are so keen to get on with their jobs, that they throw caution to the wind. Here’s a quick Vox Pop Quiz – see how many of these things have happened in your university (phew, it’s anonymous!):
If you’ve ticked any of the boxes, then hopefully the following material will help you feel a warm glow of anticipation.
The 25 minute lesson covers BitLocker (which you may already know from Windows Vista, but it has added more control for easily securing pesky memory sticks) and AppLocker. It’s AppLocker which I think will make you smile. It allows you fine granularity of control over what software can, and can’t, be installed or run on your university-owned computers. It’s more sophisticated than a “Lock it all down!” approach, and might be a good solution to allow you to devolve more control to staff over their ‘own’ laptops, without opening the floodgates to a software-installing-and-licensing nightmare.
Even though I can’t claim to understand what a Hash Key is, I found the level and pace of the material perfect – it tells a very clear story, very well.
Continuing my thread of half-term learning snacks, this one’s is shorter (only 7 minutes long), but talks about a feature which you may want to think about to help your academic staff.
Here’s a scenario that may well have happened in your college:
It doesn’t take much – okay, it probably only takes 10 minutes and them asking their own teenage child “Can you set this up for me” - for it turn from a secure laptop, to an open-for-business home file server – with hard disk shared with every other computer in the household. Next thing you know…
There are obviously two approaches to this. One is to lock it down, which I personally think removes the ability for staff to feel ownership. The other approach is to allow academic staff some flexibility and sense of ownership, but making sure that they don’t wander into trouble. (Like accidentally sharing any confidential data with their own children!)
HomeGroup, in Windows 7, is a new feature which is designed to make things a little easier to manage. As well as enabling easier home networking (at last!), it also means that “domain joined” computers – ie your university laptops – can be connected to their home resources (like printers, and shared photos etc) without compromising the security of the files on the laptop.
Take a look at the “Creating a HomeGroup” chapter to see what it can do.
ps I used to work for a company which locked down our laptops – we got absolutely no control over software installation, and very restricted Internet access. As a result, most of us spent the time emailing files between home computers and work computers. If I wanted to write a presentation with images, I typically wrote it at home, and then emailed them to myself on my work laptop (even though it was sitting on the same desk). The same happened in reverse if I wanted to print something out. The IT people probably thought they had good security, but our workarounds probably drove a cart-and-horses through it!
This could be part of a “things you wish you’d heard about earlier…” series. If you’re working within a UK university, then it’s almost guaranteed that your university has signed a Microsoft Campus Agreement, and that this applies to YOU!
The deal, in a nutshell, is that you can place a bulk order, on behalf of employees at your university, for full copies of Office 2007 Enterprise for £6.93 each, for them to use on their home computer. Microsoft ship the software to you, and you can then recover the cost from staff who want a copy. But you here’s the catch. The £6.93 offer is only open until the 15th June 2009. And it is for employees’ home use only, not for your use within the university.
The deal, in a nutshell, is that you can place a bulk order, on behalf of employees at your university, for full copies of Office 2007 Enterprise for £6.93 each, for them to use on their home computer. Microsoft ship the software to you, and you can then recover the cost from staff who want a copy.
But you here’s the catch. The £6.93 offer is only open until the 15th June 2009. And it is for employees’ home use only, not for your use within the university.
The Campus Agreement comes with a feature called Software Assurance, and that includes a benefit called the Home Use Programme (HUP). This means employees of the university can normally buy Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 for £12.93 for their own home computer. HUP is mainly designed for business users of Microsoft software, to increase employee satisfaction, employee retention, and training and productivity. (I’ll whisper this so that only the IT people hear - it’s also been seen to reduce support costs).
The licence allows employees to use the software as long as they work for the organisation, and as long as the organisation is covered by Software Assurance. Unlike the similar “Work At Home” scheme, the employee is the one responsible for correctly licensing (ie you simply have to let them know when they should stop using it, you’re not expected to enforce this).
It is easy to activate:
It’s that simple.
And instead of paying £90 in a shop for Office Home & Student, your employees have Office Enterprise for their home computers for less than £7.
We’ve got HUP Information Packs sitting here in the office, with a resources CD to help promote it internally. If you want one, just drop James an email
I completely recognise that this deadline is very short. And I don’t expect that you’re going to be able to get all of your staff to decide whether they want a copy with just a fortnight to place your order. But a quick email around staff could quickly identify some that want it. And after the offer is closed, your staff can still order individually via the normal route (I’ll write that bit up next) for £12.93.
You probably have heard about the Ultimate Steal before. It’s the offer where students with a .ac.uk email address can buy a copy of Office 2007 Ultimate edition, for £38.95
UK students have some of the highest rates of usage of Microsoft Office in the world, and also one of the highest rates of ‘mis-licensing’.
Okay, that’s me being nice. The research tells us that some students know that ‘borrowing’ software from friends & parents isn’t allowed. And the copy floating around on a blank DVD with a licence key number written on it may not quite be legit.
As we get near the end of the promotion, we’ve created some web banners that colleges and universities can put on their websites, to remind students that the deal is just about to close (at the end of June). This is especially handy for those who are just about to graduate – once they leave your hallowed halls, they return to a world where ‘student deals’ disappear, and they will end up paying a lot more for the same things. And that’s true with software too. There’s unlikely to be a better deal available for them.
If you want to tell your students about the deal, especially before they leave you for the big wide world, then you can download any of the banners below and put them onto your student portal.
Download from here, and then link them to The Ultimate Steal website for the UK
But first, some fascinating insights into which ones worked where in the world…
United Kindom
Last year we used this web banner in the UK, and we know that it was pretty successful. For some reason, UK students liked something that was between “dull” and “whacky” – in our research focus groups, they said that if we were too cool, it wouldn’t be right.
United States
Students in the US seemed to respond better to a slightly plainer design. When experimenting with more graphical ones, the response rate dropped off a bit. Perhaps because they were mesmerised by the lovely colours?
Microsoft.com advertising
On www.microsoft.com, we found that students responded well to the “save 90%” message. But we were never sure if it was just students clicking it, or general visitors to the website. This is because the website is read by all kinds of people, whereas the other banners only went on websites read by students, such as university & college portals.
Australia
Oz was the interesting one. They found that students responded to something quite different. In fact, the whole marketing campaign in Australia was themed around “It’s not piracy”. And it worked very well.
We’re starting to wonder, if we were able to run a student offer next year, whether this would be a fun idea for UK students.
What do you think?