I was asking a few questions prior to a new website deployment the other day that related to which mail client the office had in use. This particular group had the Home and Student version of Microsoft Office. I asked how much they paid for it, and they had three seats at around £90 per seat. This is the full commercial price. The Home and Student version of MS Office does not include Outlook. So they still needed an email client or they would need to handle all email through a web based client.
Great Deals for Charities!
Now this group were also a registered charity; like most of my clients. I had exchanged mails a few weeks ago with another group setting up a remote installation of Office 365 for free. They had bought my attention to TT-exchange.org.
Established charities can purchase software and other products from TT-Exchange for a small administrative fee and get access to the full commercial product, but under a licence for charity use only. I checked on behalf of the organisation I was working with and identified that they could get multiple copies of the Professional Version of MS Office 2010 for £16 + VAT. This is a really great deal. The most recent version of MS Office 2013 Professional is currently £21 +VAT.
Reviewing your IT budget?
If you are about to review your IT spend, or are looking at upgrading, you can do it for a whole lot less than commercial rates provided you are a registered charity. This will help you to spend your funds where they matter: delivering services to those you support.
You can read about tt-exchange here: https://www.tt-exchange.org/ Even if you do not need anything right now, it would still be a good idea to register to ensure you are plugged into their pricing for the future.