Free Microsoft Office download for UD-owned computers

3:23 p.m., Dec. 6, 2007--“I am very pleased to announce that the University has signed a Microsoft Campus Agreement that permits a copy of Microsoft Office to be downloaded to all University-owned computers,” Leila Lyons, director, IT-User Services, said.

The University purchased the software from Microsoft through this agreement.

“This is a significant advantage to the campus community on many levels,” Lyons said.

“The Campus Agreement greatly reduces the University's overall cost of the Microsoft Office suite. Previously, departments were buying licenses at a much higher price, often having to be selective on when individual systems were upgraded, and also tracking all those purchases,” she said.

“I'm delighted,” Walt Dabell, CITA, Student Health Services said. “This new agreement will be an enormous savings in money and time for me and other CITAs on campus. I'll no longer need to keep track of individual licenses, transferring a license to a different computer, and the mounds of paperwork that used to be necessary,” he said.

The license includes these applications:

Microsoft Office Enterprise 2003 (Windows);
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (Windows);
Microsoft Office 2004 Mac (Macintosh); and
Microsoft Office 2008 Mac (Macintosh--expected release date January 2008).

Access to this license is restricted to University of Delaware “knowledge-workers” (Microsoft's terminology for faculty and staff who use a computer in their University-related work).

“To make access to the software as convenient as possible, we've made it available for download from the University's UDeploy Web site,” Lyons said.

On the UDeploy Web site, [http://udeploy.udel.edu], faculty and staff will need to provide their UDelNet IDs and passwords to download the software.

The license restricts installation of the software to only computers owned by the University and used by faculty, staff and students. Personally owned computers are not eligible. Under this agreement, students may not download and install the software.

For more information, contact the IT Help Center at (302) 831-6000 or [consult@udel.edu].