Scottish schools get help with StarOffice

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The Scottish Executive has signalled a possible move away from Microsoft Office with the signing on Thursday of a deal that will enable it to manage licences for Sun's StarOffice7 suite of office applications.

As a result of the deal, any school, college, university or local authority in Scotland will be able to ask the Executive to manage its licences.

The Executive has not actually bought any licences -- which are provided at no cost to educational establishments under Sun's StarOffice 7 Education Licensing programme. But the deal will allow it to provide licensing support for 2,833 Scottish schools - which would mean 738,597 students and 50,048 teachers using StarOffice if every school decided to take advantage of the offer.

"The Executive is taking on a reseller role," said a Sun spokeswoman. "An institution can still go to Sun to get the software, but now the Executive will be able to take a lot of the hassle of managing licences off their hands." Sun says that it charges a "a small fee" to cover duplication costs of the software.

Each StarOffice licence allows the software to be installed on five different PCs, letting people run it at work and at home, for example.

Information about how to obtain copies of the licence will be distributed through Learning and Teaching Scotland and other agencies in the near future, said Sun.

Talkback

This is an interesting development but I wonder why they are considering Staroffice rather than Openoffice.org as there are no significant differences for most users. I appreciate that educational users will pay only a small distribution charge but that adds up across the whole of Scotland. It would be quite easy for someone in the secretariat to download the freebie and send it out on CDs to schools along with the next set of government circulars. If they are going to send them a piece of paper saying they have negotiated an agreement with Sun they could as easily do this. Come to think of it they could send a copy to everybody in the country with their council tax demand - at least they would be getting something for their money. Most people only ever see software in shops and never realise that there are free alternatives.

via Facebook 7 May, 2004 12:17
Reply

StarOffice does have some functionalities OpenOffice doesn't have, but more importantly: It has Sun.

The contract no doubt includes installation and support.
For companies (and even more so governments) it is always important to have a single point where they can vent complaints and get support.

And although StarOffice isn't free, it isn't particularly expensive either (especially for educational institutions), so I can imagine that it already compounds a huge saving over MS Office while still getting services and support, something they wouldn't have if they would've chosen OpenOffice.

via Facebook 7 May, 2004 12:38
Reply

StarOffice does have some functionalities OpenOffice doesn't have, but more importantly: It has Sun.

The contract no doubt includes installation and support.
For companies (and even more so governments) it is always important to have a single point where they can vent complaints and get support.

And although StarOffice isn't free, it isn't particularly expensive either (especially for educational institutions), so I can imagine that it already compounds a huge saving over MS Office while still getting services and support, something they wouldn't have if they would've chosen OpenOffice.

via Facebook 7 May, 2004 12:39
Reply

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