In the Microsoft Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES) Program Guide, the Microsoft formula for calculating the FTE count in the United States is is stated as follows: Full-time Faculty + (Part-time Faculty / 3) + Full-time Staff + (Part-time Staff /2) = FTE Count. It is noted that "Employees such as maintenance, grounds keeping, and cafeteria staff may be excluded from the faculty/staff FTE employee count if they do not use institutional devices." In the UK, the FTE count is made up of Faculty and Staff members where:

Microsoft recently announced changes to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDN AA) program as part of a rebranding exercise to DreamSpark.

An MSDN AA subscription was/is a free benefit to EES subscribers with a department that uses technology in the support of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) courses, although if you tried to sign-up with the promotion code HSCOMP provided in the EES welcome letter you might have thought otherwise - unless the letter has been recently updated, you will need to call Microsoft Volume Licensing for an updated code on 0800 917 9016.

Licensing for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) can be challenging enough, but under EES there are the added complexities of different price-points for the enterprise-wide FTE count, ‘additional products’ i.e. per-department licensing, and the Student Option - the option to subscribe to software under EES at a lower price point for student-owned or student-exclusive devices.

The unit price to license RDS CALs as an additional product is higher than the unit price for the FTE count, as it assumed you will buy less of them on a departmental basis. The lowest priced option is student-owned or student exclusive devices only.

Very generally speaking we found that Microsoft have priced the desktop platform products (Windows 7 Upgrade, Office 2010, and Core CAL or Enterprise CAL suite) very attractively, e.g. they will be cheaper under EES if you upgrade within 8 years.

Interestingly though, this is not necessarily true for the server products, and using the Windows Server Operating System license as an example, we found that EES is comparable to a perpetual license after 3 years.

The EES program rules state that you must license at least one of the desktop platform products according to your FTE count, so it is perfectly acceptable to license your server infrastructure with perpetual licenses (with or without software assurance) if you wish.