Product List Licensing Documentation Redesigned

A redesign of Microsoft’s monthly Product List, introduced on Apr. 1, 2014, is better organized, easier to navigate, and more concise. The redesigned format, which provides the same types of licensing-related information for products and online services as before, should allow customers and partners to find information faster and promises to be less intimidating to first-time users. However, the simplification efforts are limited to cosmetic improvements only—the same complexities related to product and volume licensing rules, license availability, and license grants under Software Assurance (SA) still remain, and thus assessing licensing requirements, options, and compliance continues to be challenging.

Improvements to the Product List

The redesigned Product List makes two major improvements:

Most information for each product is in one place. In previous Product List versions, licensing details for a product or online service were dispersed across multiple sections of the document. For example, a list of the volume licensing programs offering a product was in one place, and SA license grants for the product were in another. Now the Product List is organized predominantly by product and online service offering, with most (but not all) associated information centralized in a single entry.