Compliance and Enterprise Deployment

Organizations need to understand the basic licensing model of Office suites in volume licensing to plan their purchases and enforce compliance. The rules are relatively simple when licensing a single PC for an installed Office suite, but they become more challenging in organizations that deploy and maintain Office for large numbers of PCs and other devices.

The rights and capabilities described in this chapter apply only to Office Standard 2010 and Office Professional Plus 2010 bought in volume licensing. Office 2010 suites bought at retail or preinstalled on PCs from an OEM do not deliver all these features. Consequently, many large organizations will avoid such purchases. (See the chart “Downsides to OEM and Retail Office Suite Purchases“.)

Client Devices Licensed, Primary User Has Special Status

Office Standard and Office Professional Plus follow Microsoft’s Desktop Applications licensing model. In general, an Office suite license is required for any client access device used to present an Office user interface. In the most common case, the licensed device is a Windows PC where Office is installed and runs. However, an organization might need to license other types of devices, even devices that don’t run Office. For example, a user might use an Apple iPad to remotely access Office running on a server; by default, the iPad will require an Office license, even though it can’t run the software.