Licensing Headaches

Licensing is a nightmare for any admin. We hate it and we even hate the bloke that has to make sure we comply.

A distant vaguely related subsidiary of ours recently got hit with a million pound bill for license infringement by Microsoft. Bow whatever you feel about Microsoft or their prices or anything it is for the most part black and white when it comes to paying for licences.

You use the software you, know how much of which bit of software you are using and you pay (through the nose) for it. That’s the deal. If they come calling as they are allowed to under the terms of their licence agreement you get charged full whack for everything that is installed that you haven’t got proof of licences for. The subsidiary in question rather ineptly decided to make everyone a local admin of their PC/Laptop so they could get all the badly written bits of software running.

That is stupid in itself and sign of a weak IT department. Not surprisingly the users installed everything going on their laptops/PCs including games and all sorts of software from Microsoft. The subsidiary now has quite few licenses for Microsoft’s Halo 2 and Age of Empires which by any stretch of the imagination cannot be considered LOB apps.

Fortunately for us our Licensing guru is quite anal and runs a tight ship (though the Macs are a bit of a wild west but that’s another story) yet we still found ourselves falling foul of a little MS gotcha. Somewhere along the line we seem to have installed MS Office 2007 Enterprise on all our PCs, this being the version licensed under our Enterprise agreement, though it seems that since the move to Office 2010 the Enterprise version no longer exists so all we get is Profession Plus. A quick look back as far as we can would indicate that we made a mistake, but I can’t help feeling that somewhere along the line we have been caught out by either the version change where MS dumped the Enterprise version and made Pro Plus the top dog and those way up the food chain that negotiate our Enterprise Agreement decided to downgrade our version without a heads up (they tried something similar when removing  SQL CALs once which left us with the option of either adding back or re-license all our SQL servers on per CPU license which would have cost £100K!).

The upshot of all this is that we uninstall all the copies of Office 2007 Enterprise and reinstall Office 2007 Pro Plus. What is the difference between the two versions? OneNote, Grove and errr…… not much else.

We could just uninstall those but that’s not good enough, no you have to uninstall the whole lot and install the right suite. If we were to move to Office 2010 Profession Plus instead, One Note would return and Groove is no more and as no one used it who cares?. However, that would cause training issues as our users would struggle to cope with the changes apparently so the uninstall and reinstall is the way forward. Despite the imminent Exchange upgrade to 2010 that really needs the Outlook 2010 to fully take advantage of.

With our desktops this is a relatively straight forward prospect using Altiris or any other remote software management tool, but with the increase of the self-important laptop it is more problematic, and potentially political. No one would notice the desktops but the laptops require planning and co-ordination with the user which when you start looking at reps that don’t come in to an office all that frequently you are looking at a real organisational headache.

Like a previous post stated.

Do it once and do it right.