Steve's TS2 Insider

Q: (from Jim)

We attended a great licensing training with you at the Microsoft office.  How would I find out about other upcoming Vendor/Reseller trainings for various Microsoft products, as this would be very convenient for our Staff?  Thanks!

A:

You can either research events from our national list:

www.microsoft.com/events

Which should overlap with the TS2 events:

http://www.microsoftts2.com/liveEvents.aspx

Or you can look locally through the regional partner portal:

https://partner.microsoft.com, click on the Sales and Marketing tab, click the Local Engagement branch, choose the appropriate region and area

You will also want to get on your local Partner Community Manager newsletter.

http://www.mssmallbiz.com/pcms/ and click on the appropriate state

Q: (from Rob)

A customer buys EBS 2008 and the appropriate CALs, if they add a Windows Server 2008 (or 2 or 3 more standard edition servers ) do the EBS CALs cover the CAL requirement for those new servers too? Or do they have to buy server CALs as well?

A:

If the customer buys EBS CALs, they cover additional member servers added to the EBS environment. The same is true for SBS CALs.

Q: (from Paul)

Is the Solutions Pathway sold through a reseller or direct from Microsoft?

A:

The short answer: It appears to be sold direct from Microsoft. But let’s start from the beginning…

With previous editions of Small Business Server, if you grew out of the SBS environment (you wanted more than 75 client computers, you wanted a multi-domain trust, or you wanted to move the Exchange server off of the domain controller) you could upgrade with something called the Transition Pack. The Transition Pack would effectively remove the restrictions of SBS; giving you the freedom to move the SBS applications to other servers, trust other domains, and go beyond the 75 CAL limit. But the Transition Pack is no longer sold as of December 31st, 2008. So now what do you do?

The Solutions Pathway helps customers upgrade their current server solution to a solution that fits their business needs better. The challenged faced by Microsoft is that we not only have the legacy products of SBS 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2003 R2, but we also have SBS 2008, EBS 2008, and Windows Server 2008. If I’m running Windows Server 2003 R2 and want to go to EBS 2008; using the old technique of a Transition Pack, Microsoft would have to create several new product SKUs unique to each combination. The decision was to avoid that complexity with the Solutions Pathway.

Using the Solutions Pathway (available Nov 12, 2008) the customer decides the best choice of technology which results in their moving into a Windows Essential Server Solution (WESS), out of a WESS Solution, or from one WESS Solution to another. The customer is able to purchase the desired solution at a discount based on which of the three paths they are following:

From http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/upgrade.aspx:

So a customer moving from Windows Server 2003 R2 to Windows Essential Business Server 2008 would receive a 20% discount. A customer moving from Small Business Server 2003 R2 to Small Business Server 2008 would receive a 30% discount. And a customer moving from Small Business Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 would receive a 20% discount.

Be careful – not all versions of Small Business Server 2003 are supported with a Solutions Pathway.

From a technical point-of-view, the tools available with the various server products will help transition your users and data from one platform to the other – this is all about the licensing.

For more details on the Solutions Pathway process, there is a screenshot demo found in the FAQs: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/3/5/035941f2-163c-4073-b66b-7ab91151c09d/Test%20Drive%20SP.pdf

Q: (from Jim)

I have a client that buys HP PCs, originally with XP, now with Vista with the downgrade rights to XP.  They have a digital signage application that is built on the original XP SP2 build.  My first question is it legal to create an image from an OEM build?  Someone told me that it is not.  They are now having a problem since there is no license key for the downgrade to XP from Vista.  What is the best way to deal with this?  They have several hundred PCs currently and plan to deploy several hundred more.  I want to offer them the best as well as a cost efficient solution since every time they need images created by their signage application provider it gets quite costly.

A:

The letter of the license agreement does not let you take a retail or OEM version of the software and make an installation image. If the customer is under a volume licensing agreement, the answer is “yes” they have reimage rights which would allow them to build a deployment image. It also means only one activation for all of the machines covered by the volume agreement.

To get the Windows XP activation key from Microsoft, contact our activation number and tell them that you are downgrading from Vista Business or Vista Ultimate (the only two versions of Windows Vista that can be downgraded) and they will provide you a Windows XP Professional activation key. Again, if this is being done under a volume license agreement, then the activation key is needed only once to cover the VL version of Windows XP. You should also be able to use the Microsoft Volume Licensing Site (MVLS) to download the Volume License bits for Windows XP.