Previous A Professor Who Has Problems With a Company That Profits From His Lectures |
Next Entertainment Industry Urges Texas to Adopt Law to Curb Student File Sharing |
May 20, 2008, 10:32 AM ET
Microsoft Offers Free Advanced Design Programs to Students
For no charge, college students can now get their hands on advanced Microsoft development and design tools—the DreamSpark suite of programs—without the software giant or any other outside vendor getting their hands on students’ personal information.
The company said today that it would join the InCommon Federation, a “one-stop shop” that lets a college student access dozens of different outside resources, such as journal archives or Microsoft programs, with just one log-on, rather than remembering different passwords and log-on names for every site they need to access. The first approach, with the single log-on controlled by InCommon and the university, is the cutting-edge in identity-management on the Internet. That second approach, of course, is a royal pain.
InCommon, which is administered by Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium, serves more than 80 higher education institutions and service providers, with close to 2 million users. The idea behind it, as The Chronicle has reported, is that all a student needs to do is provide their university credentials. As long as that university is part of InCommon, the door is opened to a world of resources. Now that world includes Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio, Windows Server Standard Edition, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition.—Josh Fischman
Categories: Security
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.