Office 2013 Perpetual Licensing Largely Unchanged

The two Office 2013 suites for Windows PCs offered through volume licensing—Office Standard 2013 and Office Professional Plus 2013—retain the same per-device licensing model, pricing, product use rights, and Software Assurance (SA) benefits as their Office 2010 predecessors. However, Microsoft has added two new mobility-related rights to enable business use of Office on Windows RT tablets (such as Microsoft’s Surface devices) and to enable Office 2013 users to roam among computers with Windows 8’s Windows To Go feature.

Still the Same

With Office 2013, the traditional Office suite licensing approach—purchasing perpetual licenses through volume licensing programs—remains intact, and it is still based on a per-device licensing model, with each client device used to display the Office user interface (in most cases) requiring an Office license. Devices requiring a license include client PCs and Macs where Office executes locally, as well as devices used to interact with Office suites installed and executing on Remote Desktop Session Host (formerly called Terminal Server) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) servers.