In an interesting move Becta have referred Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading alleging anti-competitive practices in relation to Microsoft Office and the School's Licence Agreement (SLA).
To read the full press release (not long, and worth reading) click here.
Now I'm not normally the kind of person to stick up for the big M, but I think Becta are taking a simplistic view here. The SLA does offer some distinct advantages over other forms of Microsoft licensing:
- You can forget about auditing your Office installations as you are covered for evry PC on the premises (and it certainly used to allow teachers to have a copy on their home pc as well, not sure if this is still the case though).
- With all other forms of licensing Office there is no upgrade path, so when you want to buy a new version of Office you have to start again - can leave you with many different versions of Office all over school.
However, it does presuppose that you want Office on every workstation in the building - not unreasonable if you are doing all your planning in Word and keeping assessment records in Excel etc, but not everyone uses Office as their curriculum word processor by any means and so a mor limited install - say to teacher laptops might be more appropriate.
Becta argue that there are many perfectly good open source alternatives such as Open Office, and they are absolutely right. The decision to switch however is not simple, teachers tend to be very conservative and many will baulk at the thought of moving out of their comfort zone and ditching Office, a product that most will have used for many years. The main advice I have here is not to try and operate a mixed environment - I did at Crumpsall Lane a few years back and the users with Open Office on their laptops felt they had an inferior product and refused point blank to use it. If you decide to go the Open Office route make sure that the decision is a collective one and that you all make the switch together. That way everybody starts at ground zero learning together, and there will be no interopoerability problems with Word users trying to open Open Office documents and vice versa.
Possibly an even better approach would be to use an online office system. My favourite by far is Zoho, from which I have used their wordprocessor, spreadsheet, wiki, project management and poll systems. All are very simple to use, and are free or very cheap. One of the main benefits of using a system like Zoho is that children can access their work at home without having to install any software. Managing all those Zoho accounts might be a bit of an administrative effort, but the pay off would be worth it.
In short, there are definitely cost advantages in choosing Open Office over Microsoft, and the use of an online office system such as Zoho could give you many new opportunities if you have a community that has a high take up of broadband. However, if you are an existing Microsoft Office site, don't take the decision to switch too swiftly, consider all the ramifications, test the alternatives and discuss widely, otherwise you will be in for a rocky ride.
