Western Information Technology Services (ITS) recently added three popular – and powerful – site licenses to Western’s collection of software packages commonly available to the university community. Included in that mix are:
- Microsoft Campus Agreement, primarily covering Microsoft Office, plus Operating System upgrades, available to all faculty and staff on Western’s Main Campus;
- Mathworks, covering Matlab and Simulink statistical analysis software tools for quantitative research support, available to all faculty, staff and graduate students on Western’s Main Campus; and
- Qualtrics, a cloud-based survey solution to support qualitative research, available to all faculty and staff current, and students later this year. Contact ITS at mysurveys@uwo.caand a member of the support team will contact you to discuss your data collection needs and the costs associated with using this service.
“We’re excited about being able to offer the campus these licenses,” said Jeff Grieve, ITS Director. “These are popular – and powerful – tools that are, or will be, used by many people across campus every day.”
Over the past 9-10 months, ITS has explored opportunities to implement campus software site licenses to enable broader access to selective software packages at a reduced price.
Software licenses are often handled on a user-by-user basis – a colleague needs Program X, so the lab buys her access to Program X. That method, Grieve explained, works fine, but it does not leverage the size – and buying power – of the whole university.
Campus software site licenses are blanket agreements that allow any member of an organization access to programs. Some software vendors, such as Microsoft, offer these licenses to universities so the institution can use their size to reduce the per individual license costs.
“It took a lot of work, in collaboration with a number of our IT colleagues from across campus, to design and implement these agreements. Taken in total, they enable our Western community to gain greater access to high-quality software at a lower overall cost,” Grieve said. “We think this is a certainly win-win outcome for Western.”
Detailed information can be found on the ITS Site License website, uwo.ca/its/sitelicense/.