At the NCCCIA Conference this past week, I attended the Microsoft & Academia Partnership session. We learned about many good things that Microsoft is doing to partner with Academia. DreamSpark was just released and made available to students and faculty last week. It enables students to validate their enrollment at a college through
http://www.journeyed.com/and then acquire necessary software they may need at no cost.
DreamSpark (https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/)