Microsoft,amp,#39,Licensing,Mo technology Microsoft's Licensing Model (sigh)

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One of my biggest, most important responsibilities in my day job is ensuringthat we have purchased all of the software licenses that we require. It'smy job to ensure that we are 100% legal at all times - which fulfills one ofour corporate goals to be a completely ethical company.Most companies make it very simply for me and my staff. If I want to licenseNorton Antivirus, all I need to do is count the number of machines on whichthe product is to be installed, write up a purchase order and call thesalesperson to order the product. It works the same with Conversion Plus,Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, WinZIP and any of the other hundreds ofproducts that we require to keep our company in business.You would think that Microsoft would want to make it easy for people like meto give them money. I know that if I were in their shoes that's what I woulddo.I should stop for a minute and explain that I love many Microsoft products.Windows 2000 (server and professional) are very solid, well-thought-outoperating systems, and the Office 2000 suite is easily the best in theindustry. Internet Explorer is far superior to Netscape and has been forseveral years now, and Visio 2000 is one of the most versatile flowchartingtools available anywhere.Unfortunately, purchasing and licensing Microsoft products is nowhere nearas pleasurable as using their office suite. My god, they make it sodifficult to purchase licenses that I've often considered (especiallyrecently) switching the entire company to Unix and WordPerfect just tosimplify my life.Okay, let's take the Office suite of products. In a sane world, you would dothis one of three ways:- You could just buy everything (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and so on)- You could purchase the "base" kit, then purchase additional licenses forthe pieces that you needed. For example, spend $75 on the base, then add $40for Word, and perhaps $10 for PowerPoint, and then don't purchase Access.This could all be done with a licensing key.- Just purchase each piece separately.Naturally, Microsoft didn't choose any of these methods. What you haveinstead is a number of "suites", each a different mix of products. Forexample, if you just need Word and Excel, you could purchase OfficeStandard. If, on the other hand, you also need Access, then you need topurchase Office Premium. To make matters even worse, depending upon how manyof each product you want to purchase you can use different discount scales.It's enough to make one pull his hair out in frustration. But wait, it getseven worse with the operating systems. You want Windows 2000 server, thenyou need to purchase a license for the server, a license for eachworkstation (Windows 2000 Professional) and a Client Access License (CAL)for each workstation that needs to access a server. And, of course,depending upon how many of each you buy you get a different discount scale.Oh, we're not finished yet. You also have the choice of ordering Backoffice,which contains many of the server products sold by Microsoft. It may (or maynot) be cheaper to get one Backoffice license than, say, an Exchangelicense, a SQL license and a Windows 2000 server license. Then you've got toremember if you purchase Backoffice or the separate products for your serverin order to purchase either Backoffice CALs or the individual CALs for eachproduct. And, of course, each product has it's own discount scale dependingupon how many you purchase.Now, with the impending release of Windows XP and the release of Office XP,it has, believe it or not, got even more confusing.Take a deep breath and see if you can follow this. We purchased some 500copies of Office 95, which we upgraded to Office 97, then upgraded to Office2000. We looked carefully at Office XP and quickly decided we did not wantto install it on any of our systems. We are happy with Office 2000.However, we might want to upgrade to the version of Office following that,or even the one after that (Microsoft seems to be releasing a new versionevery couple of years). In the past, we would simply pay an upgrade fee togo from wherever we were to the new version.No more. Now, we have to purchase what is basically upgrade insurance by aparticular deadline (it was September but this seems to have been moved toFebruary). We also have to pay to upgrade everything to Office XP at thesame time. If we do not do this, we will wind up paying over 200% more if wedecide to upgrade at some point in the future.Okay, so Microsoft is forcing us to pay now for a product which we may ormay not want in the future. Personally, I believe they know that Office XPis not a product which most people want - in fact, I don't know of anysystem manager anywhere who is even considering upgrading to the newversion. Why not? The user interface is significantly different (requiringretraining), the performance is poor (requires more hardware to operate) andthe benefits TO THE USER are completely nonexistent.It gets worse. We have decided to go ahead and get the upgrade insurance andupgrade our product on paper. However, we definitely do not want to installOffice XP on any machine at any time. Thus, we simply want to make thepurchase to retain our rights to upgrades in the future.We are allowed to install the older versions as much as we want under theterms of the license agreements as long as we purchase enough licenses ofthe new version to cover it all. So we went to purchase Office XPProfessional, then found ourselves in an interesting position.We originally bought the Professional edition because we wanted Publisher.Unfortunately, Microsoft has decided to remove Publisher from Office XPProfessional (in fact, they have also removed Frontpage - no huge lossconsidering that Frontpage XP is not an improvement over 2000).This introduced lots of confusion into the picture. After much study andhours of phone discussions with Microsoft, we determined that we couldinstall Office Professional 2000 with Publisher for each of the OfficeProfessional XP licenses that we purchased. If, however, we did upgrade toOffice Professional XP, then we would need to purchase one additionalPublisher license per machine.It would be so much easier if we could just purchase 500 licenses for Word,500 for Excel and 500 for Publisher. We would be happy to purchase amaintenance agreement for the whole mix. We don't need Access or PowerPoint,yet due to the way Microsoft has it all structured we have to purchaselicenses for them. Sigh.Now I have to go figure out how to upgrade and license my Windows NT andWindows 2000 machines. It's enough to make me look into the mirror to see ifI have any more gray hairs. Article Tags: 2000 Server, Windows 2000