Appendix: Purchasing Office System Solutions

Evaluating systems built with the Office suite and related applications requires looking at the costs of licenses for those systems. This section contains a review of the most important licensing principles for Office System solutions, an overview of licensing and pricing for key components-the Office suite and SQL Server-and licensing and pricing examples for each of the solution types described in this report. However, the licensing costs of any solutions will probably be small relative to the total cost of software, services, and support over the solution’s lifetime, and licensing costs will vary widely depending on the volume of software that organizations buy from Microsoft.

Licensing Principles

Although Microsoft licensing is determined product group by product group, the Office System products share some common principles. This is a brief review, not a comprehensive reference for licensing of these products; see the Resources chapter at the end of this report for more detailed references.