How do i find what i am licensed for? Help!

[farquea]

I took over the network manager role recently and I have a project on at the moment and being asked if i have a schools agreement for our MS licenses and to be honest, i have no idea.

 

I know who all Microsoft licenses were bought through but i really want to untangle the mess and have a clear understanding of what we currently have and what i need to do if i want to buy new versions of Server or Office.

 

Can anyone help me by suggesting where to start?

[LeMarchand]

Either ask your AO/Bursar/whoever if there is a large annual payment going out to your MS licence supplier, or ring said supplier.

 

That said, if you're buying individual licenses, I'd assume that you don't have a schools agreement.

 

Most resellers seem to be quite understanding with school problems IME. I've had to ring up and explain who I am etc and got the details I needed.

[adhutton]

Hi -

 

I have the same problem.

 

Do you have a current schools agreement with a software reseller?

 

If you do, that is a good.

 

They can run something called a 'Claret Report' (I think that's what it is called) via Microsoft to see exactly which licences Microsoft think your school already has with them and under what terms.

 

That gave me a starting point from which to move forward.

 

Andrew

[witch]

Well - contacting who they were bought through would be the obvious first step. They may be able to give you a complete picture of what the school has bought over the years.

I did look at the actuall license codes used on the equipment which gave me an idea of how many 'sets' of licenses were bought - using something like the magical jellybean keyfinder, as I knew we didnt have a schools agreement

I had this problem when I started here and in the end I was told by Microsoft that if I could not prove that we had licenses - and I really tried - then we would have to buy them all over again

[Poco]

there is a much simpler option now pending how helpful your supplier is.

 

I recent had a situation where my customer who was a consultant was taking over from a rogue network manager. long and short was the direct end user emailed me specific permission to view all licenses attached to that company. i contacted microsoft to explain the situation and they just asked for a copy of the email. job done everything was combined into one account and viewable by the end user within a day

 

You can of course do that directly yourself with microsoft but im not sure if the procedure is the same.

 

hope that helps

[Fraser-09]

Have a look at ProduKey. It will generate a report of all Licence keys for all (online) computers in a domain, ip range or local machine only. You can also extract keys from the Software registry from dead windows installations by attaching the HDD to a second machine.

Download links are about 3/4 of the way down the page. I normally just extract the exe only, then right click Run as Administrator.

 

Then, I usually google the mircosoft office product keys to see it it comes up on file sharing website such as torrents etc. If Google comes back with no results, I presume it's legit. Then again, Im not in the School/Academic line for IT. At this time, I dunno a better way to check the keys for software piracy ??

 

 

 

Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder's download is a exe which installs the utility onto the computer. If you look just above the screenshot on their site, you can download it in a Zip. Again, you could just extract the exe and use it without actually installing (as this task is probably a one off, or once in a while task)

 

 

Faser

Edited March 5, 2011 by Fraser-09

[sukh]

Hi

 

Like everyone said. Contact AER they should know.

 

If you have SCCM then you can perform discovery and use asset management to check software deployed against what you are covered for.

 

Regards

Sukh

 

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