The Information Technology department is now offering students and faculty the opportunity to download the new Office 365 ProPlus free of charge.
Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel and other Microsoft applications are included in the package, available for up to five devices per person.
The university does not pay for this service.
“It is an offering from Microsoft to educational institutions. All of office 365, including the email system, they offer to institutions free of charge,” said Fawn Gary, director of Unified Technology Support.
Office 365 ProPlus can also be purchased at the Ball State Tech Center for $27. The main difference between purchasing and downloading the media is the subscription.
Having a subscription allows for automatic updates to the software. When downloading it through the Tech Center, students and faculty will only be purchasing the latest version.
However, the subscription will not last forever, Gary said. Once a student graduates or a faculty member is no longer associated with the university, the subscription will end.
“When we sell the media in the store, a lot of devices these days are not coming with optical drives,” Gary said. “So you buy a laptop, and you don’t even have an optical drive to install it. A lot of students were borrowing optical drives to install the media, and this [subscription] takes care of that problem.”
If someone wants to install the media on more than five devices, they would have to get a consumer subscription from Microsoft with a different account.
“It’s a great opportunity offered, but I don’t think offering it for five devices is really necessary," said Rebecca Schlesinger, sophomore economics and business administration major. "But I do think I would take advantage of it if I needed it."
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