Q: (from Bruce)
Thank you for taking the time today to answer all questions, the seminar was very informative and helpful. I would appreciate the link for the slide presentation.
I do have a question regarding one of my customers if you can help me on how to advise them. They currently have 22 desktops and 2 laptops, about 10 of the desktops are Win2k and are being budgeted to be replaced next spring. The remaining computers are all Win XP Pro, most are running Office 2000, some have Office 2k3 and a few Office 2k7. They would prefer to standardize depending on price. All machines are older than 90 days. What would you advice me to have all computers running Office 2k7? I’m not sure that we want to run Vista at this point.
Thanks again for all your help
A:
Excellent question. Truly testing to practice what I was preaching!
Assuming they would like to take advantage of something like “Portable Use Rights” we should try to get them into a volume licensing program: Open Business or Open Value.
Assuming they would like to take advantage of a Software Assurance benefit like “Home Use Rights” then we should get them into Open Value.
Since standardizing on Vista is not desired at this time and you didn’t mention anything about servers and server CALs, then recommending the Open Value Company Wide Desktop Professional is not a good choice.
But we could recommend Open Value Company Wide on just the Office 2007. But this gives them NO credit for the copies of Office 2003 and 2007 they already own.
If cash flow is the biggest concern, you can look at Open Value Subscription on the Office and even get the “Up to Date” discount on the copies of Office 2003 and 2007 they already have. But remember, this puts them on the subscription path – no perpetual rights.
I would recommend running these scenarios through License Wise at www.MS-GearUp.com to get some estimated numbers that you can work through with the customer.
The deck can be found on my SkyDrive:
http://cid-9dc1b9c3c6b95b61.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Licensing%20Bootcamp%20Public%20Files/081016%20TechData%20and%20Microsoft%20Licensing%20Bootcamp.pptx
Thanks for supporting Microsoft.