Licensing Deadline Extended

Volume licensing customers will have a few months longer to become compliant with Microsoft’s new product upgrade policies, the company has announced. Microsoft has extended the deadlines for purchasing its existing Upgrade Advantage licenses and for applying Upgrade Advantage’s replacement, called Software Assurance, to existing software.

The deadlines were changed because volume licensing customers wanted more time to fit the new volume licensing program into their budgets, says Simon Hughes, program manager for worldwide licensing and pricing. In addition, European customers found Microsoft’s previous deadline colliding with Euro conversion projects that must be complete by Jan. 1, 2002.

The Software Assurance Transition

The impact of the changed deadlines is easier to understand with an overview of the changes to volume licensing that Microsoft announced in May 2001.

Microsoft announced that on Oct. 1, 2001, it would eliminate all existing volume upgrade licenses, such as version upgrades and Upgrade Advantage (UA), which allows customers to upgrade to the current version of a product at any time during the term of their license agreement. These volume upgrade licenses will be replaced by Software Assurance (SA), which differs in two significant ways: