Category: MS Licensing

A bunch of bloggers have been ranting (and counter-ranting) about Microsoft licensing lately. If you’re tired of listening to my own diatribes, try these instead: Vijay Riyait Dave Overton #1 Dave Overton #2 Susanne Dansey Adam Vero To review my past postings on the topic, see the category summary. Incidentally, the question I posed in […]

There’s a webcast coming up in October about Microsoft licensing. I took a look at the names, titles, and job descriptions of the panelists to see whether it might make sense for me to send some of my licensing rants directly to these individuals. Didn’t help. Joe Matz “is corporate vice president of the Worldwide Licensing and […]

It’s in the high 90’s in Boston today, but it’s even hotter where I am, in Microsoft licensing hell. One of my customers needs a couple of new computers. The customer has an active Open Value agreement. I want to make sure that these computers will be able to run Office 2003 Professional now and […]

I got this by e-mail today from my software distributor: With the launch of Windows Vista™ and the known reliability of Windows Server 2003, Software Assurance, a multifaceted maintenance offer from Microsoft, is more compelling than ever. Whether your customers have 5, 50 or 500 PCs, Software Assurance provides the support and features so your […]

In one of his many posts about this year’s Microsoft partner conference in Denver, Vlad refers to a certain memo I wrote and distributed at last year’s conference in Boston. Vlad, re-read the memo. I didn’t “demand change.” I suggested that Microsoft bring together the appropriate group of managers and have them consider making changes […]

Found this by accident today. It would be a great resource if somebody updated it with the latest information. (It informs us that Vista will be available in 2006, for example.) Still, it’s the best thing I’ve found to date that explains exactly what the Software Assurance benefits are, why they might be considered valuable, […]

One of my clients cannot upgrade to Office 2007 because they use some software that tightly integrates with Office 2003, and this software is not Office 2007-ready (at least not yet). Sometime later this summer, they will no longer be able to get Office 2003 preinstalled on the computers they buy from Dell. Instead, they’ll […]

Ed Bott of ZDNet has a piece on his blog yesterday about the morass that is Microsoft licensing. Nothing real new here, but it’s nice to see the issue mentioned in the mainstream media blogs.

Never has there been and likely never shall there be a more tumultuous month for the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS) than what we’ve just been through. It was bad enough that Vista, Office 2007, and Exchange 2007 were released to the public well before the January Action Pack shipped, and that Exchange 2007 will […]

Warning: This is long. Really long. Like 17,000+ words / 30+ pages long. You might not be able to take it all in one sitting. But I thought it was important to consolidate a lot of information into a single post. Microsoft has a relatively new software bundle that they’re pushing hard. It’s called the […]