New PC Supplier Selected

CaTS and Purchasing completed a new Invitation to Negotiate process during the fall to select a new PC supplier.  Pomeroy/HP were selected and offer the university aggressive pricing, 5 year warranty on desktops and reliable equipment.  Pomeroy also donated 10 PCs for the Cyber Café in the student union.

The HP PCs selected are Enterprise-class PCs, not consumer grade.  Enterprise PCs have lower failure rates – typically 3-5% in the first year vs. 15% for consumer products – better warranties and offer consistent parts for lower support costs. Consumer-grade PCs also come with much shorter warranties and very limited support.

HP recommended PCs and laptops are available on CaTS Express Order sheets on the CaTS Purchasing Guides website, and Pomeroy will be launching an online store later in February.

Minimum Equipment Guidelines

Updated minimum equipment guidelines for fiscal 2007-8 were presented.  These give departments an easy way to identify PCs that may need to be replaced during the upcoming budget cycle.  The minimum equipment guidelines are also available at the Purchasing Guides website listed above.  Departments that have questions or concerns about their current inventory of PCs can contact CaTS for assistance.

Non-Supported Products Changes

CaTS will be tightening up guidelines for non-supported products.  To reap the greatest rewards from the new PC contract, departments should purchase these recommended PCs and not look for cheaper, lower-quality products that drive up support costs.  The university owns more than 4,000 PCs and support costs are significant.  Recommended PCs come pre-imaged from the factory with standard university software, saving about an hour in setup time for both CaTS and the end-user.  Manually installing software, dealing with driver issues, etc on non-standard equipment is time-consuming and frustrating. 

 Microsoft Vista and Office 2007

Microsoft will be releasing Windows Vista and Office 2007 this month.  They feature significant changes that will require extensive retraining. Because of changes in file formats in Office, security and networking changes in Vista, CaTS will not be supporting them initially.  We are currently testing Vista and Office and anticipate adoption after the first service pack release at the end of the year.

Microsoft Contract Update

15 state schools participate in joint contracts with Microsoft and our designated reseller, SHI.  The current contract is up in July.  We are trying to negotiate better pricing, but Microsoft has a built-in 23% price increase for our schools to get us to standard educational pricing.  The cost to the university is unsustainable and we need to examine ways to lower our costs.  This will also free up Tech Fee funds for other uses. We are looking at a new contract offering that would eliminate the current student licensing that requires us to pay a fixed amount for each student.  Under the new plan we would purchase and resell licenses to students, but at a higher cost.  Today we charge students $45 for Office, under the new contract we anticipate the price being around $80, still much lower than the $250 academic retail or $499 commercial retail.

Under the new contract we would maintain Windows, Office, Visual Studio for university owned machines, but may drop Front Page because of cost. CaTS recommends Adobe Contribute instead.