License Rights Documentation Simplified

A complicated but important part of Microsoft’s volume licensing structure, the product use rights granted to volume licensing customers, will be simplified in July 2005. The simplification is particularly important as the number of Microsoft products increases and the company enters new areas, such as online services for enterprises. The simplification effort so far is limited to documentation—complex licensing rules themselves have not changed—but exceptions may be rarer in the future: product groups that don’t want to use the standard rules for their product category will need to make a business case for exceptions.

The Need for Rationalization

Product use rights (PUR)—which, in spite of the name, are more properly “product use restrictions”—are summarized in a lengthy (currently 107 pages) document organized around Microsoft’s volume licensing “pools,” which are used to lump products together for the purpose of giving customers volume discounts based on the number and type of licenses that they buy. Those pools are systems, consisting of the Windows desktop OS; applications, such as Office and other desktop applications; and servers, which consists of Windows Server and server applications. The PUR document has additional sections devoted to online services and developer tools. Each section lists general restrictions, followed by exceptions to those restrictions.