Microsoft licensing has a new family member, Enrolment for Education Solutions AKA EES.

Currently, there are 2 education specific licensing programs, Schools Agreements & Campus Agreements (I’m not including Open Academic & Select Academic as specific). These offer huge savings over standard licence costs but there are certain requirements that don’t always please people, mainly the requirements to cover ALL eligible desktops, even if they’re already licenced or not to be used for that purpose.

Last year, Microsoft introduced a pilot licensing scheme for education called SESP, which I covered here:

Read Microsoft Licensing- Subscription Enrollment for Schools

Not much has been heard about SESP since then, but it’s influence can definitely been seen in EES.

It’s interesting to note that Live@EDU, the free email+ service for Further/Higher Education establishments will be fully integrated into EES.

What’s different?

The big change is that EES is based on an FTE (Full Time Employee) count, rather than the number of desktops. This will, for almost all schools and colleges, dramatically reduce the number of licences needed.

Another change is the ability to add “non-platform” products in any quantity at any stage of the contract. This will reduce costs as well as help reduce complexity and perceived “pointlessness” of licensing. A good example of this is one we had with a customer a year or 2 ago, where they wanted 70 something Terminal Service CALs but they were required to purchase 700+ as that was their desktop count! Many grumbles were made about that as 600+ of them were never used and seen as a complete waste of money.

Something else that will help organizations further reduce costs is the ability to pro-rate the pricing of additional products, with a minimum charge of 6 months. For example:

Product added in month 3 = full price x 0.75

Product added in month 9 = full price x 0.5

You can also define an organization in a much more granular fashion so it could be:

• Entire school district
• Entire school
• Just Year 11
• Just the science departments

or more…much more flexible

However you define the organization, the minimum entry point is still 300 units.

What exactly is FTE?

Perhaps not surprisingly, FTE isn’t quite as straight forward as just “Full Time Employees”! The actual calculation is:

“Non desktop PC Users” such as maintenance or food service staff can be excluded from the count. MS point out that you must include “student employees”, although I’m not sure what they are?!

Launch

EES is being made available at different time in different regions, and also through different channels. December 2010 will see the limited launch of EES.

In the US & Canada = December launch of EES under Campus Agreement via Distribution & Value Add Resellers (VARs).

In EMEA = December launch of EES to Campus Customer only via Large Account Resellers (LARs) only.

In APAC = December launch of EES under Campus Agreement via LAR only.

It won’t be available to primary & secondary schools in EMEA until March 1st 2011.