Dear All, I am looking for opinions on the email below: I also asked Steve to clarify who pays for this on the teaching machines on level 3 and his answer is in between the hashes ##########################################################################That's all paid for by ICT centrally but it can only be used on College owned machines. The idea of Dreamspark is that you can then say to students "go to this web site and you can have the same setup at home as in College" and all for free. I think it's a nice selling point if we provide this for the students (and it is pretty cheap!) Steve ########################################################################## My opinion is that £242.06/year seems nothing, however, I would like some evidence that other groups would use it before recommending to Kenny that we buy it as wasting even £250/year is bad (could be spent on some sort of party for those on the departmental computing committee instead ;-) for example). As for the UG, we are moving away from Visual Studio when teaching them so they are less likely to be asking for it at home regardless. I have cc'ed Kenny in case he has any strong feeling (such as we are in danger of wasting more than £250 of people's salary discussing and so so should just buy it). Best, david -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Microsoft Dreamspark Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 08:42:14 +0000 From: Rochford, Steve <s.rochford@imperial.ac.uk> To: Colling, David J <d.colling@imperial.ac.uk> Dreamspark (https://www.dreamspark.com/) is a collection of Microsoft software aimed at Universities. It’s undergone a number of changes recently (there used to be a free product called Dreamspark and a paid for product called Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance and these have now merged) The Maths department buys this so that their PhD students can have a free copy of Windows and Visual Studio on their personally owned computers but a side benefit is that all students can be offered the range of software (it doesn’t cover Microsoft Office but it does cover many other packages). Adrian Sutton’s group currently has a license which is about to expire which was only used by his group but it could be renewed and extended to the whole Physics department at a price of £242.06 for the next 3 years. If the department paid for this then all students and staff could have a legal copy of any version of Windows on their personal computer as well as all the developer tools. I think this would be a good thing – we quite often get students whose machine needs to be reinstalled and they’ve got no install discs and we can’t help because we can’t use our license on personal machines. Who could make a decision about spending the money? Steve