MS Office required for my business, what is the most cost effective way to get it?

[mj2000uk]

Hi All

Our business has 4 machines that require MS Office. We require Word, Excel and most importantly Outlook as we share a calendar in this with our various mobile phones etc.

My question is, without you guys offering me all of the non MS free office suites, what is the most cost effective way of getting MS Office for my business?

Of course we want it all above board and legal so the student licence versions are not an option.

Any ideas on this one are much appreciated.

Cheers

Mike

[fisicx]

Buy it. There is no shortcut solution if you want to remain above boeard and legal.

And from your post it seems that you don't need the latest version so why not buy Office 2000/2003 - it's far cheaper, does everything you need and is less resouce hungry than the Office 2007 monster.

Why are you so against open source (free) office suites? OpenOffice is almost identical to MS office and allows you to open and save MS Office documents.

[simonr]

I'd echo that last question. We don't have a single piece of MS software on our PC in the office - OO works just fine. I'm guessing the answer lies in the need to link with your mobiles, though, and until mobiles catch up with better alternatives I think you might be right in your assumption that you're limited.

That said, there are a few online alternatives that might be worthwhile spending a lunchtime or two investigating.

To you original question however, you could respond to spam selling you OEM (joking!!!) or how about seeing if your hardware supplier with throw it in if you're setting up your office and buying a few machines at a time?

Alternatively, why not investigate the option of only having one version of the software installed on a server? Kills two birds with one stone, too, as it starts to create backup options.

S

[BIZAL]

Hi

You can buy what is called OEM software if you buy it at the same time you buy a pc. same product but no nice box and again MUST be baught at the same time and no a hard disk is not a pc sorry

oh www.pless.co.uk is worth a look but you will find many PC builders can do this for you and you dont need to buy the monitor