CTOs who have read Microsoft’s volume license agreements and product use rights documentation know that Microsoft has a special place in its heart for contractual “grey area.” To some extent, that fact likely arises from the practical impossibility of trying to accurately capture all of the technical parameters that could affect license rights. Enterprise IT…
Businesses seeking to license older versions of Microsoft products may encounter challenges acquiring valid licenses. This is a particular concern for some companies that utilize Microsoft products as the basis for their IT infrastructure and that want to avoid a costly migration to new software versions. Microsoft offers a number of options under its Volume…
With the April 2014 versions of the Product Use Rights (PUR) (for volume licensees) and the Services Provider Use Rights (SPUR) (for services providers under SPLA), Microsoft has implemented significant changes to several usage rights associated with fail-over or disaster-recovery (DR) installations of its server products. As many IT professionals know, Microsoft’s fail-over rights always…
As discussed previously, providers of software hosting services may deploy on their servers Microsoft products licensed by their customers under two different scenarios, one of those being where the hosting provider has dedicated a physical server for use by the customer providing the licenses. However, providers thinking of taking advantage of this option need to…
Like any good business, many providers of hosted IT solutions prefer to demonstrate flexibility in offering services to their customers. For example, a company that offers hosted Exchange services may want to allow their customers to use perpetual licenses the customers purchased to support deployments on the service provider’s servers. While Microsoft’s licensing rules permit…
