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 \u2013 my favourite of all time has to be Visual Studio LightSwitch \u2013 licensed of course per developer. Other days we offered sage pieces of perhaps forgotten licensing lore \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
It was fun and we gave away lots of prizes, but what was the point?!<\/p>\n
Well, as licensing gets more and more complicated and there\u2019s more and more to remember we\u2019ve realised that there\u2019s a need for a set of reference books where you can quickly and easily look up answers to licensing questions. It\u2019s the sort of question that you know must be answered in the old Product Lists somewhere but you\u2019re time pressured and you just want the answer NOW. As an example, let\u2019s say you\u2019re doing\/preparing for an audit and you come across Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC licences with SA \u2013 now what was the grant for Windows Server 2012???<\/p>\n
We\u2019re very pleased to announce that throughout 2016 we\u2019ll be releasing a new range of books entitled \u201cEssential Licensing Questions\u201d 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\u2019re wondering about the question I posed above\u2026 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\u2019d go to page 163 of the September 2012 Product List to confirm it.<\/p>\n