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Standards for Software Acquisition, Retention and Cost-Sharing

Standards for software acquisition, retention and cost-sharing were developed in spring 1999 by a task force of representatives from the university's seven colleges. The guidelines include a quantitative measurement of the software's cost effectiveness (measured by cost per launch per year in Computing Services clusters) and a series of non-cost factors that are considered for software that does not satisfy the quantitative measure. These factors include the number of students in a course, degree of reliance on the software in a course, and uniqueness of the software.

Based on these standards:

  • Computing Services will pay for broadly used and essential applications.  Examples from this category include:  Oracle financials, Symantec Antivirus, PureMessage, Anti-Spam software, and Oracle Calendar.
  • Computing Services will pay for broadly used operating systems, compilers and applications for which the cost is $1/launch or less in an academic year.  Examples from this category include:  Mathematica, SAS, Minitab, S-Plus, Maple, X-Win32, and Sun OS, development tools, and compilers.
  • Computing Services will pay for software primarily used for teaching (in clusters) for which the cost in Computing Services clusters is $1/launch or less in an academic year.  Examples from this category include:  Matlab, Adobe products, and Macromedia products.
  • Computing Services and departments will share the cost for commonly used productivity software and certain software applications used primarily for teaching (in clusters), but for which the cost to license exceeds the defined $1/launch/year quantitative metric. Examples from this category include the Microsoft Campus Agreement software, AutoDesk ACES products, IMSL and MathCAD
  • Departments and/or colleges will pay for special-purpose software for Computing Services clusters and Andrew that costs more than $1/launch/year and that will be used by only one or two departments. Examples from this category include Ansys, Macintosh Common Lisp, MacVector and Microstation, ProEngineer.