I wonder if you saw our social media posts just before Christmas? We had a bit of Christmas fun with licensing (yes really!) and some days we challenged you to pick out the real Microsoft products from a list and to tell us how they were licensed – my favourite of all time has to be Visual Studio LightSwitch – licensed of course per developer. Other days we offered sage pieces of perhaps forgotten licensing lore – how on earth do you remember that with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Licence Mobility was included with the server licence rather than as an SA benefit? And sometimes we asked you how good your knowledge of previous versions was, and of course we picked that oft-renamed product Skype for Business Server aka Lync Server, or Office Communications Server, or even further back as Live Communications Server.

It was fun and we gave away lots of prizes, but what was the point?!

Well, as licensing gets more and more complicated and there’s more and more to remember we’ve realised that there’s a need for a set of reference books where you can quickly and easily look up answers to licensing questions. It’s the sort of question that you know must be answered in the old Product Lists somewhere but you’re time pressured and you just want the answer NOW. As an example, let’s say you’re doing/preparing for an audit and you come across Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC licences with SA – now what was the grant for Windows Server 2012???

We’re very pleased to announce that throughout 2016 we’ll be releasing a new range of books entitled “Essential Licensing Questions” which will, of course, include the answers(!) as well as the official Microsoft place you can go to to extract the full text if you need it. Now, if you’re wondering about the question I posed above… For every two Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC licences with active SA, a customer was granted one Windows Server 2012 Standard Processor-based licence and you’d go to page 163 of the September 2012 Product List to confirm it.

We’re expecting the first book – Essential Licensing Questions on Windows Server – to be released in January 2016, so watch out to see how you can be involved. At this point we’d love to hear from you if you want to be a reviewer for this first book – just email info@licensingschool.co.uk and we’ll send you a book as soon as it’s available.

Exciting times!