We are pleased to announce a pilot agreement to provide Adobe software
to all campus faculty, staff, and students at no cost to individuals or
departments for the 2011–12 fiscal year. Beginning September 6, students were able to download the Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium edition, and on September 19, the full Adobe Creative
Suite Master Collection was available to faculty and staff for download. Both suites include Acrobat X Pro.
OE—Productivity Suite
This agreement is part of the Operational Excellence–sponsored Productivity Suite (PS) project, which advances the OE goal of reducing complexity by alleviating the departmental administrative burden of researching, purchasing, updating, and distributing licenses for the most commonly used software and tools. Eliminating individual purchases lowers administrative costs and enables the campus to achieve significantly larger discounts than are traditionally available to campuses.
Software standards
As a part of the Operational Excellence initiative's focus on improving governance, the OE Executive Committee has recommended establishing software standards on the campus. To achieve this goal as quickly as possible, the OE Executive Committee has authorized us, in our roles as Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance and Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO, to work together to identify and implement campus software standards. The agreement with Adobe is the first of several such programs under development that are based on an analysis of the most commonly purchased software at UC Berkeley.
Cost recovery
The Adobe Creative Suite will be available at no cost to individuals or departments during FY 2011–12. Starting FY 2012–13, cost recovery for faculty and staff will be achieved through a new funding model that is under development by a team in the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance. We expect to have more detailed information to share about the model in the coming months. For students, during FY 2011–12 ASUC President Vishalli Loomba and Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab are partnering on this project to support the deployment and assess interest and usage throughout the year. Assuming student interest is high, ongoing cost recovery for students will be sought via a future Student Technology Fee referendum.
More information
For more information about Adobe Creative Suite, Acrobat Pro, and the pilot agreement, and to find out how you can download the software, visit the Adobe Campuswide Software License page.