Introduction

Microsoft’s volume licensing programs are a potent tool for saving money on software purchases, reducing the cost of managing software, enforcing corporate software standards, and accessing products and services unavailable any other way.

Types of Plans

To meet the requirements of many different types of businesses, Microsoft offers three major families of volume licensing plans:

• Open plans, which offer moderate discounts, can be used for small purchases, and require no long-term commitments
• Select plans, which provide greater discounts but are more complex and require high purchase volumes
• Enterprise Agreements, which license all client PCs in an organization to use common desktop software.

These plans cover everything from small organizations with two or three computers and half a dozen employees to global enterprises.

In general, these plans represent an ascending scale of volume in software purchases. As a rough guide, Open can be used by organizations of any size, starting with a single-PC office and including midmarket customers with as many as 1,000 PCs; Select is useful to organizations with 250 or more PCs and to organizations with many servers and server-based applications; and Enterprise Agreements are available for organizations with 250 PCs or more and focus primarily on licensing all computers in an organization for the latest versions of Windows and Office.