If you use the OpenValue licence you get the spread the initial cost AND the renewal cost over three years. SO, if the licence & SA costs £100 then you pay £33 per year for the first three years. In years 4+ you would pay just £11 per year.

Compare this to spending say £66 on a retail licence and then £40-ish on upgrades for new versions when they are released. (Though Office 2010 won’t have a specific “upgrade” price.)

Alternatively, you could spend £40 on an OEM version every time you change your hardware.
[All prices are hypothetical.]

Having predictable costs and spreading the payments are features of licencing that are quite valuable to most SMEs.

Large enterprise may find SA useful because of the extent of their IS operations but smaller businesses who have few dedicated staff and write down their hardware/system purchases over a time frame greater than the Microsoft OS/App turnover cycle will be better off financially simply paying out for new licenses when required.

The company I work for decided not to opt for SA on the basis that we do not upgrade server OS’s and apps in place and desktop application suite turnover is rare (we still use Office 2K3 at present) and tend to retain servers for 4-5 years and desktops for 4. SA would cost us in the region of 20% over the cost of simply replacing licenses.

Sorry, I started rambling…

I still do not understand the exclusion of Outlook from Home and Student edition of Office2007. More and more Outlook/Exchange is the de-facto standard for business email and Word ditto for document creation, so for many people it would make sense to have Office on their home PCs, but the pricing structure is such that to add outlook would cost 70% of the (list)retail cost of Office home and student (or more, a lot more if you opt for Office Standard).

Having said that, many of the features of Outlook are wasted in a home environment as it is primarily geared towards integration with enterprise application servers, primarily exchange and sharepoint.

You can buy the Standard edition but only through the Volume Licencing (VL) route, not retail. Microsoft sell far more licences through VL than through retail channels so VL is the normal way to sell for them.

You only need to be buying five licences (of any combination of Microsoft products) to qualify for VL deals. If you’re kitting out three PCs with Windows and Office, you’re already buying six licences and VL may be better value than retail.

Open Value Licences allow you to spread the cost over three years and include Software Assurance (SA) so you can upgrade to the next version as soon as it is released and extras such as desktop & laptop licences for each user, “At Home” use and extra training.

If you’ve just got one or two PCs and don’t update them with each new release, retail (Full Package Product), Upgrade or OEM licences may be more cost effective.

Beware, however, that OEM licences die with the computer so if you have an OEM version of an applicaiton, you can’t use the application when you buy a new PC. You have to buy the application again even if you’ve bought an upgrade to a new version in the meantime. To keep using the application for ever you have to buy FPP Retail (and then upgrades) or VL (with SA).

Simon Jones
Contributing Editor
PC Pro

Still don’t understand how the “standard” version can be the standard version, if you can’t actually buy it!

And the “Standard” version can’t be purchased? How can it be the *?*?ing standard version, when you can’t buy it? :-S

OneNote seems to be missing from the list. Has this been dropped?

OneNote is useful on desktops and laptops, not just Tablet PCs. Its not just about handwriting. Its about gathering information from many different sources – web pages, other applications – and organising it. Once you’ve gathered the information it can be used to inform decisions or rearranged, pasted into other applications, formatted and turned into finished documents.

OneNote has long deserved a wider audience and I’m very glad it has finally got it.

Simon Jones
Contributing Editor
PC Pro