Student Advantage delivers Office Pro Plus to over 1million New Zealand students, at no additional cost
Today Microsoft announced the Student Advantage programme, which will help ensure all students at New Zealand schools and higher education institutions have access to the productivity tools used in most New Zealand workplaces, before they enter the workforce.
Beginning 1 December 2013, every school and tertiary provider in New Zealand that licenses Office for staff and faculty will be eligible to get Office 365 Pro Plus for its students at no additional cost.
This comes off the back of The IDC Workforce Readiness Study, released today by Microsoft, which reveals the key skills that people looking for work in high-growth, high-salary jobs need. Behind core communication skills and attention to detail, the third most important skill for prospective employees is knowing how to use Microsoft Office.
Paul Muckleston Managing Director of Microsoft New Zealand, says Student Advantage gives schools and academic institutions the tools they need to better prepare students for entering the workforce, without spending additional money.
“The impact of Student Advantage for New Zealand students is going to be far reaching. We believe it will help address the country’s challenge of ensuring equity of access for all students to eLearning, as more than one million students will be eligible for Office 365 ProPlus under this new benefit.”
More information can be found here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/10/15/microsoft-announces-new-student-advantage-program-to-prepare-students-for-tomorrow-s-jobs.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/oct13/10-15skillspr.aspx
For New Zealand schools to take up this added benefit, the steps are:
- Add the zero-cost Student Advantage sku to your Microsoft agreement; and
- Deploy the no-cost Office 365 A2 Plan service for staff and students; then
- Students are able to download the Office Pro Plus client software to their devices (up to 5 devices per student)
Please contact your Microsoft Reseller for more details:
- For schools enrolled in the Microsoft Schools Agreement with the Ministry of Education, please contact Datacom on 0800 22 55 428
- For all other schools, please contact your Academic Reseller or partner
http://blogs.technet.com/b/nzedu/archive/2013/10/16/student-advantage-delivers-office-pro-plus-to-over-1million-new-zealand-students-at-no-additional-cost.aspx
Replies
Andrew Godfrey (View all users posts) 21 Oct 2013 11:09am ()This issue has had bit of discussion on the MLE Reference group as well: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mle-reference-group/9ZeQfkdIX1M
Maybe a discussion that should have been had in the "Techies for Schools" group but still indicative of the differences of opinion among some knowledgeable people.Once this information gets out to the public there may be a number of people in your community asking you to provide this service as it is both "zero-cost" and "no-cost" and therefore a no brainer. You will have to consider carefully though what the hidden costs and future implications are to your organisation before saying "sign us up".My take from the discussion is that this may work well for some schools that have all the appropriate systems (Microsoft servers, exchange, not google apps, ...) in place but you do have to consider whether this system will actually work well with your existing infrastructure.As an OS-agnostic school (Linux, Windows, Novell, OSx servers and Windows, OSx, iOS, Android, Linux clients) and google apps school (which provides free productivity software wherever you have a browser), I would rather spend my time looking for solutions that will work well across all current and possible future systems.
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