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Microsoft new licensing policy

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by boitsfort

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With Microsoft new licensing policy, companies are facing a big increase in licenses cost. To apply for Software Assurance, companies need to "get current" i.e. license e.g. Office XP even though they are fully licensed on e.g Office 2000. Or pay full license again at next upgrade. This means we have to pay for something we alreday paid for.
How are corporations (you) going to react on this "sting" from Microsoft?

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by admin-stuart

The medium sized business network I administer is doing just fine with NT4, Exchange 4, Win9x clients, and so on. I (we) refuse to do anything other than upgrade based on our needs. They can use any method they want to try to coerce us to upgrade on their schedule, but my opinion is to wait and see: the way MS talks now and how they talk in the future may be greatly affected by current and as yet unknown antitrust developments and remedies.

by 3500+ windows users

With increased head count there is an increased need for licensed machines and a licensed way for those machines to connect to each others information. We are coming off an EA this year and Microsoft has already offered us a price of less than $200 per box that includes our old version of the BackOffice CAL, which still includes a SQL CAL with that price. My two cents were to explore the most cost effective combination of licensing and CALs for my company but, of course, no analyst can compete with an Enterprise renewal price like that. Is it easier to keep signing up with the Devil and keep writing the checks? Alas yes. But with the signing of another three year EA and adding our 3500+ boxes, already fully licensed up to XP if we wished to use that OS, we are moving into something that Microsoft does not really advertise; a subscription model where the company holds the latest OS license at the end of every three years. With so much need here for an integrated web presence for our people and our customers and the secure data transfer that that entails it would be extremely costly for us to go back to another desktop, server model.

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