On June 15th, our webstore for Microsoft DreamSpark stopped working. Our webstore is provided through Kivuto, which means we have very little access or control over the service, and we often have to go to them for support when things don’t work. In this case, however, they couldn’t tell us much. Something had expired on the 15th, but I couldn’t find out what had expired or how to renew it. We had not been notified of an upcoming expiration, and there was apparently no way to fix it.
After a series of emails and phone calls of increasing urgency due to the approach of the fall semester, Kivuto decided to wipe our old webstore and setup a new one. This isn’t something we asked for, and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) explain why they had decided to take this course of action. This change resulted in both the loss of all previously accessed license keys and also broke all authentication and trust relationships between our login system and Kivuto.
Since then, Computer Services has been working on rebuilding the authentication integration to the Kivuto webstore. Our old store was grandfathered in under a different configuration method, but due to licensing changes over the last few years by Microsoft, we needed to handle the authentication differently, and this required some work of both our MIS and Enterprise Systems units.
As of today, all students and faculty at Missouri State University have access to DreamSpark Standard, which provides a limited amount of DreamSpark-licensed software for academic use. Students enrolled in at least one class during the current semester in the colleges of Business, Health and Human Services, or Natural and Applied Sciences will have access to DreamSpark Premium, as will faculty. DreamSpark Premium provides a much wider range of Microsoft software for academic use. Please note that this is different from Microsoft’s Work-at-Home licensing for Missouri State University staff and faculty. That is also accessed through Kivuto, but through a different webstore.
To access Microsoft DreamSpark, please login here: https://cams.missouristate.edu/kivuto/DreamSpark.aspx
If you run into any problems, don’t hesitate to contact the Computer Services Help Desk.