Software Availability
Please check the sections below to identify software available, free of charge, through department or campus wide license agreements. When purchasing software that is not available through department/campus-wise licenses, "... it is important the software is reviewed before the purchase to ensure it meets University standards and follows Federal and State Guidelines for security and accessibility". To initiate a review process please fill out this IT purchase Compliance Form (put Carlos Benavente as the NCSU technical contact).
Also, per campus Software Licensing Management policies, before downloading or installing software that has a clickwrap agreement on any university machine, users should 1st verify that the clickwrap agreement has been reviewed. To check what agreements were reviewed/pending and/or to submit a request for a clickwrap agreement review, please visit OIT's Clickwrap Web site.
Please e-mail any questions about software or licensing to the IT Staff at csc_help@ncsu.edu.
Adobe Acrobat Professional and Creative Cloud
NC State has a site license of Adobe Acrobat Professional for all full-time NC State employees. Effective Nov 30, 2019, all users must login to Adobe Creative Cloud in order to access Adobe Acrobat Professional. Contact csc_help@ncsu.edu for further support.
All other Adobe Products from the Creative Cloud suite (e.g. Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc) must be purchased by each user through the campus bookstore or http://www.ciacentral.com/ncadobe/interact3.htm
Adobe Acrobat Alternatives:
Adobe Acrobat is used to create, edit, and merge PDF files. People often do not need all of this functionality.
- If you only want to create PDF files from Microsoft Office Documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) recent versions of Office enable you to create a PDF when saving the document. It will not allow you to edit PDF files, but you can edit the Office document, and then re-create the PDF file.
- If you are running a Mac, you can print any file to a PDF without buying Adobe Acrobat. The capability is built right into the operating system.
Check out the OIT antivirus page.
- Apple Upgrades to latest OS X is free as long as you have a licensed copy to upgrade from and a Mac introduced in 2009 or later.
- All other Apple products can be purchased from the Apple Online Store or the University Bookstore on a per computer basis.
Several MS products (including latest versions) can be installed on department-owned equipment; such as MS Office, Visio, Visual Studio, Windows OS for Desktop and Server and more. Please contact us at csc_help@ncsu.edu for any inquiries.
Microsoft Office 365:
Faculty, Staff and Students are now eligible to participate in Microsoft's Office 365 program for NCSU. This program enables you to get a free copy of
Microsoft Office software to install and use on up to 5 personally-owned computers or tablets (any mixture of Mac, Windows, Android, or iOS) without restricting
it to work-only purposes. You are eligible to use Office 365 software as long as you are an employee or student at NCSU. See OIT's
Office 365 page for more information.