Office 2010 Pro cost

nightmare99

nightmare99

nightmare99

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A bit general I know but what is the cheapest way to obtain Office 2010 Pro for five workstations assuming we do not want SA. Would it be best to get OEM copies or is there a cheaper way via VL, this is not for educationor non profit org.
 
We generally buy Home and Business Keycard licences - this seems to be the cheapest solution I've found.

£120ish from BlueSolutions.
 
droyden said:
FYI - PKC is only valid if it comes preinstalled but just not activated (like tosh laptops)
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I'm pretty sure that this is the case.

I prefer to buy the disk version of Home & Business because it can be easily transferred to new hardware if you need to. You also have the option of installing on two machines if a user has laptop and desktop PCs. The difference in price isn’t significant.
 
On the subject of PKCs being pre-installed...

Some retailers are selling PKCs with a link to the Microsoft Office download page (here). I asked the UK Partner team at MS to clarify this earlier this year and the reply was:

If you purchased an Office 2010 Product Key Card and don’t have Office 2010 preloaded on your PC, you can download the software. This is a back-up option where the PKC has been sold / bought in error. Although we offer this download this is not the intended use of a PKC.
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MikeHiow said:
Indeed, I've downloaded it almost every time.

You can still install it on PC and Laptop.
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Install a PKC on the same user's PC and laptop?

I don't belive that is the case.

PKC FAQ

How many licenses /installations do Office Product Key Cards allow?

Each Product Key Card allows one user to activate one Office 2010 suite on one preloaded PC.
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Can I install an Office Product Key Card on more than one PC?

No. The Office Product Key Card can only be installed on one PC. If you ever need to reinstall Office you can do so on the same PC on which Office was originally installed.
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How many licenses /installations are allowed with the traditional Office discs version?

The number of installations will vary depending on the Office suite purchased. The disc version of Office Home and Student 2010 allows a user to install one copy of the software on up to three PCs in a single household for non-commercial use. (Office Home and Student 2010 cannot be used for any commercial, non-profit or revenue generating activity or by any governmental organization.) The disc version of Office Home and Business 2010 and Office Professional 2010 allows one user to install one copy on one PC and a second copy on his/her portable device such as a laptop.
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I see the same thing from our supplier, however I certainly recall reading the one copy on PC and another on a portable device.

I will check the actual box tomorrow - it may be a case that they've changed it since this one was purchased.
 
The PKC packaging has details of both the PKC and CD versions. You have to read the small print to see the licensing differences.

The most important difference is that the PKC version is OEM (and therefore tied to the first machine it’s installed on). The CD version is retail and can be transferred to new hardware without any issues.
 
I have had to install oem, oem sucks from an IT perspective because you can not realy automated it. I still syspreped the oem image i made and then i just change the office key manually afterwards. Still at that price the office license costs almost as much as a brand new i3 dell desktop with 4gb ram and windows 7 oem. madness.

I just formatted the dell machines with the included windows 7 oem 32bit disk, installed all the applications, then i installed the correct version office trial from microsoft, then input the oem key after sysprep and clone zilla. they say that you should not sysprep an oem image because technically oem is a manufacture sysprep image.
 
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On the subject of Sysprep - is it much effort?

The number of new installs performed are tiny, but I have three to do over the next few days, so if it's not much effort, I guess it could be useful having an install image I can use to deploy new machines.

Can it be done with W7 OEM, Office PKC (perhaps with the OEM toolkit, leaving the key to be entered later?)

How does it handle different hardware platforms etc?
 
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If you only have that many you might as well just do each one manually. But if you have a lot of software to install it can be quicker to sysprep. It can take a lot of effort to learn sysprep but once you know how to use it and you have scripts from previous builds then it can be pretty much instant automation.

I can image a pc within about 10mins total and then if i create default network profile (the unofficial way) when the user logs in it is ready to go. But there will always be some applications that require additional user specific configs that you can do with login scripts by setting registry values usually to current user.

If i do one manually, ie installing windows 7 from scratch, installing all the apps and then configuring them and using a default network profile that can take me 30min-1 hour.

When you sysprep an oem it just reloads the original manufacture sysprep it seems. But i created a script called setupcomplete.cmd and placed it in the c:windows\setup\scripts folder to add the pc to the domain.

What the IT person before me was doing was just cloning a pc that was made that was on teh domain and then imaging new pcs with that and then taking it off the domain and giving it a new pc name etc, this is about the worst way to image a pc.
 
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