Microsoft Software Assurance provides comprehensive maintenance and support for all your software purchases. This is administered for you by Computacenter, and combines the latest software with 24 hour phone support, training, and tools that help you to deploy, manage and migrate your software.

Benefits available to your organisation

In addition to complete management of your software licences you are entitled to the following benefits. To take full advantage of these please contact the Computacenter NHS support team.

Technical tools

• Windows PreInstallation Environment
  
• Virtual PC Express
  
• Corporate Error Reporting
  
• Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs

Training

• Training Day voucher
• eLearning

For more information on your training entitlements please contact us.

End user

• Home use programme

Home use option is available to you as part of the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.  More information on this fantastic software assurance benefit please contact us.

Your benefits and what they mean for you

• New version rights
  You get the right to deploy and use new software version releases as they become available with Software Assurance. This benefit brings you simplified procurement and shortens the business process cycle and also enable you to cut the costs of acquiring new-version releases so you can immediately take advantage of the latest technology.
  
  
• Microsoft Windows Pre-installation environment (WinPE)
  Replacing DOS, this version of Windows XP Professional can run Windows set-up, scripts and imaging applications, enabling your IT staff to build customised automation solutions to speed up deployment so you spend less time and effort keeping desktops updated.
  
  
• Windows VistaEnterprise
  Helps your organisation to lower costs and improve efficiency of IT resources. Through enhanced data protection and improved application compatibility, you can build, deploy and manage a single hard-drive image which can be rolled out across your organisation.
  
  
• Virtual PC Express
  Supports a single instance of a virtual operating system (OS) running on top of the host OS. This provides a safe way for you to migrate legacy applications during an OS upgrade. After the upgrade, it enables you to access legacy applications, even when these can't be modified to run the new OS.
  
  
• Home Use Programme
  Increase employee productivity and maximise the value of your Microsoft Office System investments by enabling your employees to work at home. The Home Use Programme allows employees to get licensed copies of selected Microsoft Office System desktop applications to install and use on a home computer, if they use them on their PC at work.
  
  Qualifying Microsoft Office System applications include:
  • Microsoft Access
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Microsoft FrontPage
  • Microsoft InfoPath
  • Microsoft Office
  • Microsoft OneNote
  • Microsoft PowerPoint
  • Microsoft Project Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Publisher
  • Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Word
  
  
• eLearning
  Your organisation also qualifies for complimentary licences for Microsoft E-Learning - flexible, on-demand, computer-based training. As it is self-paced, online learning is a convenient and efficient way to keep employees' skills current and help them reach new levels of productivity.
  
  
• 24x7 Problem Resolution Support
  As part of the NHS Agreement you can now enjoy phone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for business-critical outages on all Microsoft-supported products including all server editions, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office applications. Your organisation can also receive unlimited web support for Microsoft servers covered under a Software Assurance agreement.
  
  
• Corporate Error Reporting (CER)
  Enables your applications and operating systems to report crashes helping IT staff monitor error information, control the reports sent to Microsoft and more effectively manage fixes and resolutions.
  
  CER also enables you to find solutions to crashes by helping you:
  
  • Identify which systems are failing and why
  • Connect to up-to-date information and fixes
  • Decide what to report and to whom
  
  
• TechNet Plus
  As part of the NHS Agreement your organisation gets access to TechNet Plus Subscription content, in addition to TechNet Online Concierge Chat and premium content. TechNet Plus Subscription content includes resources such as Microsoft Knowledge Base, utilities, drivers, how-to articles, beta-release candidate software and evaluation copies of the latest applications.
  
  
• Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs for Software Assurance
  Microsoft Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs is for customers with legacy PCs who are running legacy operating systems and are not in a position to buy new hardware. It provides the same security and manageability as Microsoft Windows XP SP2, while providing a smooth migration path to the latest hardware and operating system. Windows Fundamentals allows for a limited number of workloads to be executed locally, including security software, management software, terminal emulation software, document viewers and the .NET Framework.
  
  
• Extended Lifecycle Hot-fix Support 2006
  If you have a Premier Support agreement, you can enter into an Extended Hot-fix Support Agreement (EHSA), as issues arise. The annual programme fee for EHSA is now included in the Software Assurance benefit for all five years of the Extended Support phase. This means you don't need to sign up for an EHSA within the 90 days of a product's transition from mainstream support to extended support - and you can sign up at any time during the Software Assurance agreement term. As always, our security fixes are automatically extended to customers.