It’s Online Services and SA benefits that share the headlines as the key changes in the PUR this quarter. For Online Services the big news is that ALL of the use rights for these products have been moved into the Online Services Use Rights document. This is known as the OLSUR (how DO you say that?) and we’ll focus on the useful information you can find there in a later blog post.
As far as SA benefits go, let’s start with the Extended Rights that have been added to the Remote Desktop Services CAL, detailed on page 69 onwards. These new rights apply to the User CAL only and essentially allow organisations with SA on an RDS CAL to access session-based desktops running on a third party’s shared servers – either through a “Licence Mobility through Software Assurance Partner” or making use of Windows Azure Platform Services. There’s confirmation that access is still allowed to an organisation’s own servers, and a very specific note that these rights do NOT allow access to VDI desktops running on the third party’s shared servers. Customers need to complete and submit a Licence Mobility Validation form to designate their third party of choice and there are instructions for this process too.
There’s a name change for another benefit – “Cold” Disaster Recovery Rights are now just Disaster Recovery Rights on page 70. Previous wording specified that the server must be turned off except for testing, patch management and disaster recovery. Now the emphasis is on when the Disaster Recovery server (or OSE) can run – DR testing for a week every 90 days, while the production server being recovered is down, and during the transfer to the DR server.
And the final change is around some wording in the Licence Mobility through Software Assurance section on page 70 onwards. There’s black and white clarification added that if you’re using System Center on your own servers to manage OSEs running in a third party’s shared servers or running System Center there to manage your own servers, then you absolutely need active SA on your Server Management Licences.
And, just for completeness, we say our final goodbyes to the GeoSynth and Vexcel products, as well as Expression Encoder Pro 4 and Groove Server 2010, and references to Team Foundation Service are updated to Visual Studio Online.