Adobe Creative Suite may be within reach on a college-student budget.
UF Information Technology is offering a free Adobe pilot to 4,000 students through UFApps until Feb. 15.
Students can stop by the Hub to create their UFApps Adobe pilot account to access the Adobe Creative Cloud, said Tracy Gale, communications manager for UFIT.
“We are doing this pilot — right now it’s free, so we can gauge the interest of our students,” Gale said.
At the end of February, UF senior IT staff will evaluate usage and decide whether to continue the Adobe program within UFApps. If so, they will set a discounted monthly price point for continued student access.
“At this time, we do not have details on what that price point will be, but the price point will be less expensive than Adobe’s monthly student pricing for Creative Cloud access,” Gale said.
The current Adobe student pricing structure includes a first-year enrollment pricing of $19.99 per month, which increases to $29.99 per month in the second year.
The price point will depend on how many students are interested. UFIT is hoping to see 4,000 students register, the maximum allotted under the pilot.
When UFApps originally launched in June 2014, UFIT wanted to include Adobe products, but the current license did not allow it.
“There were restrictions from Adobe how long we can offer this pilot,” Gale said. “There’s a lot of structure in place by Adobe that we have to comply with.”
Because Adobe would be in UFApps, which is in the Cloud, it would update automatically. Students would log into the most up-to-date version for no extra fee. The other 40 types of software, including PDF Editor, Serif Design Suite and AutoCAD 2014, offered through UFApps will remain free, Gale said.
Additional hardware will be installed during Winter Break to provide faster performance and enhance the Adobe user experience, she said.
Fifty students have registered for the soft launch since Nov. 6.
Telecommunication sophomore Alexis Levy, 19, went to the Help Desk after hearing about the free trial through a post on the Journalism and Communications Ambassadors program’s Facebook group page. The process took about 20 minutes.
“I’m really happy with it,” she said. “I’m happy to have free access to the same features on my computer that I’d have access to in the computer labs on campus.”
Gale said UF got approved for the trial the week before the soft launch and immediately linked senior technical staff to Adobe and got student testers at the Help Desk.
“This is really happening in real time,” Gale said. “Once we got the word that we could do this, we put it in motion to make it happen. So a lot of the details, we haven’t finalized.”
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 11/10/2014]
