Step-Up Licenses Made Permanent

Step-up licenses, introduced in 2003 as one-year promotional offers for customers with upgrade rights who wanted to migrate from standard to premium editions of many Microsoft servers and applications, have been made a permanent part of Microsoft’s licensing offerings. The company has also expanded the list of products for which step-up licenses will be available.

Why Step-Up Licenses Are Required

Step-up licenses were introduced to handle the sometimes significant changes between product editions when a new version of an application is released. Customers who found the features of a less-expensive standard edition to be sufficient with one version have sometimes found that the features they want are available only in a premium (e.g., Professional or Enterprise) edition of the successor product. Unfortunately, although Software Assurance (SA), through which customers purchase the right to upgrade, gives customers an upgrade to the next version, such as from Project Standard 2002 to Project Standard 2003, it does not permit customers to upgrade from standard to premium editions, such as from Project Standard 2002 to Project Professional 2003.