Office in Server Applications Poses Licensing Problems

 

• Many organizations have server applications that rely on legacy Office suites as a component.
• There is no documented way to properly license Office in these kinds of scenarios.
• Options for minimizing license compliance risk largely depend on how the organization already licenses Office.

The Office Professional Plus and Standard edition license model covers Office displayed on an end-user device, with the user interface powered by Office installed and running on an end-user device or within a server-based desktop. However, some organizations have server-based applications that leverage Office Professional Plus (or Standard) running on servers to perform discrete functions, such as document format conversion, that do not interact directly with users. While the product license model provides no way to fully accommodate such scenarios, customers with Office Professional Plus covered under their Enterprise Agreement (EA) are generally safe, but for others, such scenarios can create a license compliance quagmire.