During the summer, Trinity University, along with several other schools in Texas, engaged in a cooperative deal with Adobe to purchase site licenses for the Adobe Master Collection Suite which will allow the suite of software programs to be installed on all university-owned computers as well as faculty and staff computers.
The deal was set up through The Independent Colleges and Universities of Texas (ICUT), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the purposes of the total Texas higher education system.
Trinity University has used ICUT to purchase software before, according to Frank Zapata, director and chief information technology officer.
“ICUT is comprised of a lot of schools in Texas that get discounted pricing on software programs. The Microsoft Office Suite and Windows software comes through that consortium,” Zapata said.
When asked about the price of the site license, Zapata said that it would cut down on costs.
“Faculty have requested to use it in some of their classroom and teaching events. A lot of departments were ordering individual licenses, and that was adding up. Adobe finally offered a site license for it, and we decided to take it,” Zapata explains. Additionally, the money used to purchase the site license comes from savings in the technology fee.
“The access will not come with an increase in fees. We have reduced costs in our internet connection and hardware replacements to do some of these types of things,” Zapata said.
Although students and professors in various departments have previously had access to the Adobe Suite through their respective departments, this will be the first time Trinity students as a whole will have access to the Adobe Suite.
“We’ve had access to [the Adobe Suite] since I have been here,” said Aaron Delwiche, associate professor of communications. “We use Adobe Premier for video editing, Adobe Flash to create mini games, InDesign for the magazine class, and Photoshop has been the industry standard since it came out. We are already using the Adobe Suite heavily.”
Delwiche notes that the difference for the department of communication is in the funding and access,
“It’s saving us money that we were spending out of our department budget. [And the site license] will increase the availability to even more faculty [and students] in even more public spaces,” Delwiche said.
Dylan Holland, a junior engineering major is excited about the increased access for students.
“I’ve used some of the programs in the Adobe Suite in my spare time, but the free trial ran out and it’s too expensive for me to purchase individually. This will allow students to use some important programs that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” Holland said.
The Adobe Suite is already being installed across campus with an initial focus on installing the suite in labs and electronic classrooms as soon as possible, but the installation process will take some time.
“It’s a slow-tease process, because Adobe doesn’t allow us to put it in our system images, so we have to install it one by one,” said Zapata. “But we are looking at some tools that would help us roll that out quicker.”
