Microsoft Licensing for business

spectre

I plan on setting up a company in the near future which will have 15-20 Computers running Microsoft Windows Vista.

Do I require a seperate license for each machine or must I obtain a group license or something? If so, are there annual costs?

same question for MS office.

I´d be very grateful for any insight. Thanks

seamus

Depends on how you plan on getting your machines. If you're building your own machines and imaging them, then you would be better off with a volume licence - this is a single licence key unique to your company that you can use on all of your machines. You tell MS each year, how many installs you have and you pay them a certain amount.

On the other hand, if you're going to be ordering your machines in from Dell or HP on spec, they will supply the OS as OEM software and this often works out cheaper than a volume licencing agreement. Since you can't get machines from Dell (and possibly HP) without Windows installed, then it makes no sense to just throw away the OEM licence.

If you like your standard windows images, then you can customise/slipstream an OEM CD, just prompt the system builder for the OEM key on the case and you're golden.

Office is more or less the same, but I'm not sure if OEM is much cheaper.

Most of the info you need should be here:
http://www.microsoft.com/ireland/licensing/default.mspx

spectre

Thanks a million Seamus, just the info I needed!

DublinDilbert

Any chance you can use "open" office instead of Microsoft office??

I've been using it, and it's really good... any one that can use MS office can use open office without even thinking about it...