Software Policy

I. Software Licensing Policy

1. All computers operated in the Dean's Office will have only legally obtained copies of computer software on them. Dean's Office computers are those bearing a University of Georgia property control number tag, listed in the inventory of the Franklin College Dean's Office, residing in the physical areas of Old College occupied by the Dean's Office, or outlying offices.

NOTE: For most software, the generally accepted standard is that purchase of the software entitles the purchaser to put that software on one computer system only. Exceptions include some kinds of site licenses and network software. Accordingly, the normal expectation is that each computer will only have software on it that was purchased specifically and individually for that computer. It should further be noted that laptops and notebooks are considered individual computing systems, and are subject to the same software licensing scrutiny that desktop systems receive.

2. No staff member in the Dean's Office should knowingly install software on any of the systems outlined above for which she or he does not have appropriate licensing.   Staff in violation of this will be held personally liable in the case of a University software audit.

3. Staff members who purchase software outside of the guidelines recommended in Section II   for use on  University owned equipment will be responsible for maintaining the licensing information for those products, and in the event of an audit will be held responsible for producing proof of licensing. Anyone in this situation should check to be sure that they have sent out their software registration cards, and have retained the original license, manuals and disks for future reference.

NOTE: The Systems Group is responsible for proof of licensure for a majority of the operating systems and the base applications used by the Dean's Office.  Questions about responsibility can be addressed to root@franklin.uga.edu.

4. No staff member should install personally owned software on University owned and maintained systems. Software evaluations should be conducted within the guidelines offered by the manufacturer, and not through personally owned software.

5. In addition to the above guidelines, the user community should also be aware of the following University policies for acceptable use of computing resources at the University of Georgia.

II. Planning Software Purchases

When a group in the Dean's Office needs increased function from its software environment please contact a member of the Systems Group to discuss this. (If your group has a person responsible for providing application support this person should also be involved.) The object of this dialog is to assist you in finding a way to do what is needed through software tools already available to this office, or to suggest packages that can be supported. It is not a rational model for an administrative office to expand its software tools set unnessecarily.  Software tools have a substantial support overhead in terms of upgrade and training.  New tools should only be added if there is not a reasonable way to use existing tools.

This kind of discussion also provides the best opportunity for finding a solution that meets the interoperability constraints in the networked environment.  All software products, be they networking software or networked applications, have some effect on the mix of traffic on the network. These effects can be calculated to some extent, but in order to do this with successfully requires training and experience in network capacity planning. Additions to the networked application software set on the administrative network must be evaluated by the Systems Group before going into production, as behavior on the network effects all users. This process should be initiated by contacting the Franklin College MIS or Network Administrator.