Before going out and buying name brand software at retail prices, Lakeland students, faculty, and staff might want to check out the deals available on my.lakeland.edu.

Lakeland’s Information Technology (IT) department has made low-cost software available to users of the school’s website for a number of years.

The current program is accessible through the “Lakeland Links” section on the Muskie Central page of the website, and is administered by JourneyEd.com, a company that specializes in marketing educational software.

Larry Marcus, director of IT operations, said software purchase programs have been available at Lakeland since the time he began working on campus, which was nine years ago. “But we didn’t use JourneyEd nine years ago,” Marcus said.

“JourneyEd is probably three or four years old,” he continued, “and they have really pushed to make this a good program.” Marcus went on to say, “It’s easier to get access to the software than [with] our previous program.”

Lakeland’s involvement with JourneyEd is connected with the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (WAICU) consortium, which uses the combined purchasing power of its 20-member institutions to bargain for the best prices from over 450 software and hardware firms.

“We have a special agreement with Adobe and a special agreement with Microsoft,” Marcus said, “and as part of that we get access to specific products. Those are the two that you’re going to get the biggest discounts on—Adobe and Microsoft.”

Marcus stressed that the IT department does not sell the software itself, but merely makes the programs available—and helps out if any problems are encountered, which he said is a rarity.

While the IT department tries to get information out to students, mainly through flyers posted around campus and information cards in orientation packets at the beginning of the school year, Marcus worries that students who could benefit from the program may forget about it.

“At the beginning of the school year, students are being bombarded with 80 gazillion pieces of information,” he said. “They’re looking at these packets—they have all these flyers for all these different things—and I can understand why they might not remember this stuff.”

“We want people to use this,” Marcus continued. “It’s great for everybody.”

The accompanying table shows a sampling of commonly sought-out software, and includes the cost from the manufacturer, Amazon.com, and JourneyEd.

Online prices were current as of Saturday, Feb. 12.

Since the program is administered by JourneyEd.com, all information is available online and accessible through my.lakeland.edu.