Products and Platforms

Two volume programs—Open Value Company-Wide (OVCW) and Enterprise Agreements (EAs)—give customers the ability to easily license certain Microsoft software for all of the workstations and portable computers in their organization. Subdivided into three “pools”—systems, application, and servers—these software products are called “platform products” in OVCW and “enterprise products” in EAs, and a customer must purchase at least one of these products for every workstation or portable in their organization to start one of these agreements. Rows in the three sections of the chart outline the options available in each pool.

The only platform/enterprise product in the systems pool is a Windows upgrade. Any Windows PC must have a license for a full Windows business OS (such as Windows Vista Business), commonly obtained from an OEM when the computer is purchased, before it can be used with volume licensing software.

The application and server pools both offer several choices; customers are free to choose the best fit for their organization. The application pool has three editions of the Office desktop application suite, and the server pool contains four Client Access License (CAL) suites that differ both in the server products they cover and in the rights they confer for those products. (Each type of CAL gives one person or physical device the right to connect to and use any instance of a corresponding server product running within the organization; for example, a Windows Server CAL allows a client to access any server hardware within the organization that runs Windows Server.) The Small Business Server CAL Suites are designed for use with Windows Small Business Server, which includes Windows Server, Exchange, and (in the Premium Edition) SQL Server Standard Edition. The Core CAL suite delivers Standard CALs for the server products it covers, which provide rights for the most commonly used functions of the products. For example, the Standard CAL for Exchange covers use of Exchange’s e-mail and scheduling functions. The Enterprise CAL suite, in contrast, delivers both Standard and Enterprise CALs, which are required for use of some advanced server functions. For example, the Enterprise CAL for Exchange is required for access to unified messaging, which combines Exchange e-mail with voice mail and fax.