So Much Software (Microsoft MSDN Universal Subscription)

Member Name: JonRose

Product:	Microsoft MSDN Universal Subscription
Date:	18/04/01 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: loads of software, documentation and support

Disadvantages: sometimes hard to find what you want

This is a great product. No correction this is a great collection of great products. It does not matter if you love them or hate them Microsoft software is everywhere and in a professional environment there is little else you can chose.

I work as part of a small team of developers and we all need lots of software, this hits most of our requirements in one easy hit. As a lisence for visual studio enterprise edition costs at least £700 or so, plus office professional £350, plus msdn library £200, plus SQL server £500, site server commerce edition £2000, plus operating systems - lots of them, plus loads of other utilities, this is a really good value product.

The convenience of having all the CD's right there whenever you need them, there is more information contained in here than one person could ever effectively use. It is also really useful to be able to experiment with a lot of the software that they provide without having the expense of buying it speculatively.

You get regular updates every quarter and a bi monthly magazine as well as other magazines and literature. They seem to treat their MSDN subscribers very well, and open lots of additional offers and benefits to us. I am not sure how much support we get with the product, but whenever we have used it there has never been any questions asked.

Very good value for developers if you are going to use varied products, but if you do not use a range of products just buy what you need directly.

Summary: