About licensing for Office suite applications
The University of Pennsylvania has secured site licensing arrangements for Microsoft Office and Sun StarOffice. This does not mean free, but it does offer significant savings over purchasing educational or commercial licenses.
OpenOffice is a free, open-source alternative to both that is most equivalent to StarOffice, being a "close cousin" of sorts to it.
The cost of Microsoft Office is significant and the University of Pennsylvania is currently evaluating StarOffice and OpenOffice to determine if these two packages can become legitimate replacements for Microsoft's suite on a campus-wide basis.
Microsoft Office
University of Pennsylvania departments can acquire licenses through the Microsoft Select Volume Licensing Program. This program offers new features and benefits that are detailed at Penn Office of Software Licensing site.
Within the department, Computing Support has already purchased media discs for:
• Microsoft Office 2004 (Mac OS X)
• Microsoft Office 2003 (Windows 2000 and XP Professional)
• Microsoft Office 2007 (Windows XP Professional and Vista)Therefore you would simply place a department purchase order through the business office for the cost of licenses only. We can provide installation service after you demonstrate proof of purchase. You will be required to purchase one license for each workstation that will have Microsoft Office installed on it. Generally the cost is roughly $60 per workstation.
Computing Support will not install software without proof of purchase — a yellow copy of the requisition form after it is processed by the business office is sufficient.
Alternatively, if you cannot place a purchase order through the department, you may buy boxed versions of this suite from the Computer Connection at roughly $200 per license. This can be a personal purchase by staff, graduate students or faculty. If you are able to place a department purchase, however, it is recommended you do so to save money.
Sun StarOffice
StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation.
StarOffice software is a professional office productivity suite that runs on multiple operating systems, including Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. The office suite has a simple, easy-to-use interface and contains full-featured applications including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics and database capabilities. As of yet there is no version of StarOffice for Mac OS 9 or X — read the OpenOffice section for more information on Mac compatibility.
Compatibility of its documents with Microsoft Office is quite close, not entirely perfect. Nonetheless its lower licensing cost makes it an attractive alternative to Microsoft Office.
There are two license terms, depending on whether your use is personal or departmental:
Personal usage: Students, Staff, and Faculty can purchase StarOffice from the Penn Computer Connection for a $5.00 fee and install it on their personally-owned computers. Purchases are limited to one copy per person. The CD can be used to install StarOffice on up to five systems that the individual owns.
Departmental usage: StarOffice can be downloaded by and installed on computers that the University owns, operates, or maintains control over, such as computers in the Library, a lab, or in faculty and staff offices. While you will be required to register your copy, there is no charge to departments for the software. Because of licensing restrictions, the downloaded version may be installed only on departmental computers like those described above, and your cooperation in this regard is requested and appreciated.
To contact the Office of Software Licensing, e-mail licenses@pobox.upenn.edu, call +1 215 573.3587, or fax +1 215 573.4021. Or visit our office at Sansom Place West, Suite 302A, from 1-5 PM, Monday - Friday.
OpenOffice
As opposed to StarOffice, OpenOffice's current licensing scheme allows it to be downloaded and modified freely, with some standard open-source license restrictions, which you may read more about here. It offers roughly the same feature set as StarOffice, and OpenOffice works with Mac OS X, Linux (x86 and PPC), Solaris and Windows platforms.
Because StarOffice does not operate under Mac OS X and does have some licensing restrictions for personal use, OpenOffice may be a preferred alternative. However, as OpenOffice does not operate under Mac OS 9, and as it is not a "native" Mac OS X application, running instead within Apple's built-in X11 environment, it is recommended to run OpenOffice on workstations with 800 MHz G4 processors or better.
To download OpenOffice, visit this page for your specific platform download.
(You may also first need to install X11 for Mac OS X 10.3 before using OpenOffice under Mac OS X. Later versions of Mac OS X include X11 on the installation disc. Feel free to contact us if you need X11 installed.)
