Choosing Volume Licensing Programs for Office

The Office desktop application suite remains one of Microsoft’s most widely used products for business users, and the suite’s cost and number of users force organizations to evaluate their licensing and purchase options carefully. Businesses can choose among several volume licensing programs for Office purchases, each with different advantages and drawbacks in license compliance, budgeting, license cost, and flexibility. While large, global businesses will generally favor the Enterprise Agreement companywide licensing program, smaller organizations will have to weigh the trade-offs more carefully.

Two Office Suites Differ in Applications, Server Hooks

When choosing a program to buy Office, an important factor will be which Office suites an organization requires. Microsoft Office is a line of desktop application suites aimed at business users, the four most prominent applications in the suites being Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Organizations buying in Microsoft Volume Licensing programs can choose between two Office 2010 suites for Windows PCs: Office Standard 2010 and Office Professional Plus 2010. (Organizations can also license Office for Mac Standard 2011 for their Mac users.) Office applications such as Word can also be licensed individually.