Windows Licensing Management

LoLth

Just wondering how others track their microsoft product licensing.

Currently I am collating the licenses where I work by manually counting up the OEM stickers, paper licenses and disk keys , entering them onto an excel spreadsheet and putting in the serial of the machine they are installed on.

This, to me, seems a very inefficient way of doing things. Anyone know of any software , free or otherwise, that you use to license tracking ?

Capt'n Midnight

Pet hate of mine.

wouldn't it be so much easier if microsoft used unique serial numbers or keys for each license.

we've used various license inventory and tracking programs and couldn't really recommend any. Too many false negatives and positives and problems with the dB's

LoLth

would be much nicer if each install of the OS or software registered with teh server so you just had to make sure that your paper licenses matched your server statistics.

Then you'd only have to worry about non-networked licenses......

(a "decommission" and "transfer" option would be a must though!)

ats

pain in the ass to be honest. Track IT is suppose to have a util that scans the network and does license management but I've never seen it in action.

Theres a handy app called Belarc Advisor. It doesn't give you the license key but will tell you what is installed both software and hardware wise with the PCs serial number etc in a HTML file.

I then use these reports to create a spreadsheet with basically the PC name, serial number App name and license code. That way if i have to do a rebuild i can select the correct license umber etc for that machine.

Also for MS office you can get a open agreement. basically on the anniversary of your agreement you tell them how many machines have office installed on and you pay for that number of licenses. if a week later you add 100 machines you don't need to pay until your anniversary and if the 100 machines are still in use you pay for those additional machines for the next 12 months at the same rate as your previous costs. if you happen to drop head count then you only pay for what you have it installed on. dead handy if you have a fluctuating work force or you buy in a rake of new machines to replace out of date ones. It can be expensive if you jump straight into it and cover all your machines so just set up an agreement for the number of machines you have unlicensed and add to it every 12 months. it's a 3 year agreement so you are stuck to it but it does mean that office is Always fully covered

We have a rake of machines with OEM office 2K on it and upgrade packs to 2003. its a pain so basically from now on as a machine is decommissioned the replacement machine is added to my list for the open agreement. Also as the license isn't OEM it IS transferable which is pretty handy.

Now sure if they have a similar one for CAL'S, server or OS licensing

Capt'n Midnight

ats wrote:

We have a rake of machines with OEM office 2K on it and upgrade packs to 2003. its a pain so basically from now on as a machine is decommissioned the replacement machine is added to my list for the open agreement.

another option is to buy volume licenses for Works for €40-50 and upgrade it to office.