Microsoft Australia are currently running a promotion aimed at Australian university students, which entitles them to a single perpetual or 12 month license of Microsoft's Office 2007 Ultimate for $75 or $25, respectively. In order to be eligible for this offer you do need to be a current student at one of the qualifying universities, with an active university email.

A retail copy of Office Ultimate 2007 can generally be picked up for around $1170, with the upgrade version slightly cheaper, whilst a Office Student 2007 comes in at around $249. This means university students are getting Office Ultimate 2007 with a 94% discount, which is much cheaper than Student version of Office 2007.

Office Home and Student comes with 4 Office products - Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote - where Ultimate is packed with over 10 different Office products - Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook w/ business contact manager, Account Express, Publisher, Access, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, and more. For a full product comparison visit the 2007 Microsoft Office System Suites comparison page.

Upon questioning, by APC, at first Microsoft spokespersons could not provide reasoning behind the promotion. At a later date Microsoft did provide answers to some of APC's questions such as Why is MSFT doing this so cheaply?:

There are three reasons:

Overview - Microsoft has long provided academic pricing for students attending Universities with Volume Licensing agreements. This offering is available to these same students.

1. Microsoft has worked closely with universities so that students can now easily validate their student status online. This makes it easy for students to access this offer.
2. Microsoft is offering this license directly to students for the first time.
3. The online/download model eliminates the need for the CD distribution and product packaging.

Now to me it seems like Microsoft have finally realized that perhaps there is a great potential in generating a great deal of promotion through blogging (such as this) for their software. At the same time this is encouraging the group of people who probably make up the majority of software pirate's to purchase a copy of the software, rather than obtaining an illegitimate copy. This would also be helping Microsoft to perhaps gain some ground back from open source alternatives being offered by universities, such as openoffice.

There is one catch to this promotion, however, you do not receive a DVD or CD copy off Office but rather you are given an Office 2007 Ultimate key which upgrades the free downloaded trail version to a non-limited version, or a copy of office may be obtainable from your university. The product key will also only allow the installation of Office on a single computer.

If you would like to find out more about this promotion or would like to purchase your copy of Office 2007 Ultimate for $75 visit http://itsnotcheating.com.au/ or visit the Microsoft site for the terms and conditions.

Labels: microsoft, office, promotion, university

Wow, time really does go by faster than you notice it as it's going by. It has been over 3 since I first signed up with Blogger - I'm surprised they haven't deactivated my account with how inactive I have been - and so much has changed since then.

I have never been a huge blogger on my own personal life as such, rather I've been more interested in blogging about technical subjects, even though I have made a handful of different blogs. I think the biggest challenge of writing a personal blog is trying to recollect all of the interesting situations in your life and presenting them in such a way that it is entertaining for other people to read. Sure plenty of humours and interesting events may occur throughout your day, but when you got to write it in a blog, it suddenly doesn't appear so funny and interesting all of the time; Well at least not in my perspective.

My personal website, where I would normally be blogging this sort of stuff, has been down for a while now and I have felt like writing down some of my ramblings for a little while now so I thought I would revive this blogger account and start posting on here. It is certainly much easier than getting my server working again, but who knows I may get it going again one day...

Labels: blogging, life, website