Licensing Help
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This is interesting, a Licensing Advisor from Microsoft to help you make sense of their various programs and options. I think that's something many people will like since there are so many options, so many choices, and it's hard to crunch the numbers on what makes sense for your small business.
But there's a problem with this. Actually two problems that come to mind as I went through it.
First there's the understanding part of this. There are so many products and choices that I doubt that a business user in charge of picking licenses will know how many servers, what a virtual processor is, and other questions like that. Just understanding the terms is hard and it's especially hard for technical people, much less someone that doesn't use the products.
But there's another problem. It's put out by Microsoft, the company that will make money based on my decisions to buy software. Which means they have a conflict of interest and I inherently don't trust that they have built a tool geared to maximize my dollars against their dollars.
Licensing is hard and I'd hope that no one makes a decision solely on what they plug into that tool. But licensing is also time consuming and it takes away from my business. Until I'm employing 100s or 1000s of people, spending time on figuring out what is the most economical isn't worth it.
That's probably why so many companies just buy a copy of XP and a CAL for each employee along with a new license for each server.
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Licensing is an absolute nightmare, I spent so long trying to figure MS licensing model out for the Products I use that I eventually confused myself, I have even rang various licensing experts at my suppliers and got slightly different answers from each.
why oh why can't it be straight forward.
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How do people feel about the IBM model of largely charging consulting fees instead of license fees?
What is the sweet spot situation for dictating licensing terms? Who gets the best deal from Microsoft?
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The absolute worse example I've ever seen was Legato Networker. I went to their headquarters for 10 days worth of classes (three seperate classes for Legato Certified Specialist). One whole day of out those ten was spent on licensing their backup product - 8 hours!
I pointed out an error in their training materials and the instuctor and I got into a debate on it. Turned out that the training materials were wrong and the instructor didn't even catch it.
If it is too complicated for the Tech writers and instructors, can you imagine non-technical people trying to figuring it out.
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I agree with many points ... most importantly, licensing is a nightmare and you need a reasonabley versed techie to use the sight. However this is one of the few times I'll actually laud MS. I plugged in numbers for our site (200+ servers, 2000+ PCs) and then selected all of the software packages/configurations and licensing options that applied. Guess what, the cost for 3 years was within 50k (a 1.5% variance) of what we are paying on on our Enterprise Support agreement. I only took me 10 minutes on the site to do this. Now compare that amount of time to the 3 calendar months (probably 90-100 hours of time) my manager spent researching MS 'stuff', talking with various representatives of MS and other related activities. I'd say that it does provide some benefits to us and saves MS money as well !
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
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It's always amazed me that I am buying the right to use MS code and related media, not purchasing a program. Sounds like you can have your cake and eat it too.
I would like to work with all of you to develop a browser that provides all of the OS, Office, storage, backend products necessary for IT operation. That way everyone can have a dumb terminal to connect to us and pay us for using our site. Or is that the plan someday for MS.
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