A tweet yesterday from James Edwards (which led to a discussion and a series of tweets) got me a little scared about the future of Adobe Non-Profit Pricing that I’ve written about before. Then today I got an email from Adobe with the subject “Notice of new volume licensing program and temporary Adobe system shut down” with more acronyms than should be allowed in an IT email (and that’s saying a lot…and ILA (I Love Acronyms)!), which was more confusing than anything, I think because I don’t deal with points and discounts for non-profit pricing with Adobe, it’s just a straight price (and better than the points discounts anyway).
I talked to my Zones sales rep, Eric Inabnit (Eric.Inabnit@zones.com, or 800-258-0882 ext. 3361), about it to see what the real deal was. He did some checking, and like James found out from his CDW rep, it appears that Adobe is consolidating their Educational and Non-Profit SKUs to simplify things, but it appears the pricing will stay relatively similar to its present levels, with a few minor adjustments. To quote Eric, he is hearing that, “they will be combining the nonprofit and academic price sheets to simplify management on their end. They are saying that if you qualified before you will still qualify, your sku’s will most likely change however pricing changes if any, will be negligible.”
Adobe will be shutting down its entire licensing system from October 7th to October 14th, however, so you cannot retrieve your license information for existing licenses nor can you order new licenses during that time. I can live with that, I wasn’t planning on any October Adobe orders.
This is good news, and while it’s by no means the final word, it does make me worry less about the potential budget impact it might have on churches! Adobe’s products are already some of the highest-priced software packages we buy that aren’t for servers (and frankly, much of our software (Microsoft, especially) costs a lot less than some single Adobe licenses), even with the reasonably significant non-profit discount.
If I discover any additional information I’ll update this post; send me any new information if you’ve got it! (Leave a comment or mention @dszp on Twitter.) Thanks, James, for bringing the Adobe changes to my attention and checking into it as well.
There are a LOT of alternatives to Adobe software. Do the due dilligence now to work in an environment without Adobe products.
David – if you love acronyms – perhaps you should switch denoms ( ha ha )
The UMC (United Methodists) love alphabet Soup.
A Friend of mine – the communications director for the Greater NJ Annual Conference wrote an interesting article on this.
GBOD, GBGM, UMCOM, UMYF, UMM, UMW, NAUMS, are just a few :-)
It is my understanding (after trying to purchase from several online discount sites) that Adobe specifically excludes religious organizations from their non-profit pricing. I would love to know how others got around this.
I’ve not run into this issue before. My sales rep at Zones is the one who set up our non-profit purchasing through Adobe and I’ve never had a problem. You cannot get TechSoup pricing but the pricing I have is multiple times better than retail still. However, I’ve not read any specific agreements (frankly, the Adobe site is confusing enough and has enough legalese I’m not sure I’d want to spend time trying to find such a thing), I’ve just gone through my Zones rep for everything. You can talk to him if you want he can probably help you, too: Eric.Inabnit @ zones.com (remove spaces from email address. Tell him I referred you).
We had received training on this ourselves and because non profit licensing did not have an option for upgrades this change is actually a huge moneysaver. I had a customer of mine who needed the latest Web Premium and they paid half the price using the Academic upgrade.
Interesting. So now nonprofit users can upgrade and not just buy full versions like we’ve had to do if we didn’t buy upgrade insurance in the past? If so this is indeed a welcome change!