Right last December, IBM SPSS wrote to all academic sites in the UK suggesting that they were stopping issuing license codes for very old pieces of software. I was largely unconcerned about this. We were upgrading the student system in the summer and the staff were using over the summer and really sometimes moving staff onto new versions is a good idea. SPSS users tend to be research staff so they are largely staff running their own machines.
Now what I should have done is considered the small number of people who do not fall into that groups. There are some postgraduate students who use departmental machines and there are about half a dozen support staff who have managed desktop because they are supporting students in the use of SPSS. That was a mistake.
At the same time the decision is taken over the summer that the version on the old desktop would not upgrade to a newer version because of the problem of the depth of folders installed on it. This did not reach my surface consciousness, although I may have been told. It would not have been major we were planning to be on Window 7 service anyway.
At the same time I am getting a lot of staff saying SPSS is not forward compatible with datasets. Then everyone get worried. The thing is that actually with respect to data files the compatibility is forward and backward compatible right back to 9 or beyond. What is problematic is the output files. There are several solutions to this, you could open them all and export them or you can install the Legacy Viewer which allows you to view the files. A further option if you have syntax is that you can send the syntax file and the data file to the user and they can generate the output for themselves. Hardly a big problem you'd have thought.
Now lets move forward to this years renewal. The new version of the Desktop is out and running a version we have codes for. However there are a number of machines not on the new desktop. These are running the old desktop and we cannot get codes for the version of SPSS running on that. The intention is to move them on in the next six months or so, but there is a spell between where we want to be and where we are.
Well what are the options. To release the version of SPSS that has a license code onto the desktop will mean that users loose space in their profile with all those directories. So if we do not release we have to deal with users having used SPSS finding the license code has expired. Most are postgraduate students and telling them to use one of our computer rooms if they cannot persuade their department to install SPSS specially in the departmental rooms seems a fair option but that leaves members of staff.
First response is that they should not be on the managed service. Actually once I looked into who it was, it raised other questions. The group of staff I had overlooked were staff in MASH who support students in the use of statistics and mathematics during their course. Their work is largely remedial in it is getting students up to the standard where they can complete the requirements of their course. These have managed machine not because they are using administrative software that they need the managed machine for but because if they have a managed machine they are using the same thing as students. In other words they may well need upgrading to MANW7 earlier rather than later. We should be contacting them and sorting a way forward in the next few days.
We need to think this through. We also need to think how we deal with upgrading in future because the need to upgrade SPSS will not go away. We will have to move to a newer version next summer as IBM SPSS will no longer be giving out the codes for the version on at present.
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