Support  |  News & Events  |  Blog  |  About  |  Help  

Category Archives: Licensing

You Can’t Afford to Ignore Windows 10 Anymore

June 10, 2015 5:34 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Over the last several months, I’ve been watching the headlines about Windows 10 go by without really paying a lot of attention to them. Perhaps you have as well. Win10 fell into the category of “Things I Need to Look More Closely At When I Have Time.” After all, it hasn’t been that long since I upgraded to Windows 8.1. Then the news broke that “general availability” will be July 29, leading to one of those “Wait…what!?” moments. With the release now less than two months away, I realized I needed to make time.

So I bought another 8 Gb of RAM for my 64-bit Fujitsu laptop (blowing it out to a total of 12 Gb, woo hoo!), installed Client Hyper-V (which was amazingly easy to do in Windows 8.1 Enterprise), signed up for the Microsoft Insider Preview program, downloaded the Win10 ISO image, and built myself a Win10 VM.

My initial reaction is that it looks pretty good. The current preview build (10074) looks stable, seems to run everything that I’ve thrown at it, and my complaints are pretty minor. I can’t really test multimedia performance, as the preview build doesn’t have drivers that will allow audio pass-through from my Win10 VM to my host PC, but that’s not surprising at this point.

The Start menu is definitely a step in the right direction, but still doesn’t have that one piece of functionality that drove me to install Stardock Software’s Start8 utility: I love being able to click on the Start button, mouse up to, say, the Word or Excel icon, and immediately see the last several documents/spreadsheets I’ve opened, so I can jump directly to them. In Win10, if I pin, say, Word to my taskbar, I can right-click on the Word icon and see a list of recent files – but my personal preference is to reserve my taskbar for programs I’m actually running rather than taking up space with icons for programs I might want to run. Instead, I use the QuickLaunch toolbar for quick access to programs. (What – you didn’t know you could have a QuickLaunch toolbar in Windows 8.x? You can, and it works in the Win10 build I’m running as well, but that’s a subject for another post.) So, when Stardock releases a version for Win10, I’ll probably upgrade to it.

Speaking of upgrades, you’ve probably also heard that users who are running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 will get a free upgrade to Windows 10. That’s true, depending on what version you’re currently running. There is an upgrade matrix at www.thurrott.com that tells you, for the Home and Pro editions, what version of Win10 you’ll get. And if you’re running Win7 SP1 or Win 8.1 S14, you can get the upgrade pushed to you via the Windows Update function.

Windows Enterprise users will not get free upgrades…apparently the rationale is that most Windows Enterprise users are part of, well, large enterprises that typically have a corporate license agreement with Microsoft that entitles them to OS upgrades anyway, and these enterprises also want to have tighter control over who gets what upgrade and when.

There are also a few other caveats to bear in mind. First, if you’re running Win7 SP1 or later, the chances are pretty good that your system will run Win10 without any problems…but “pretty good” doesn’t mean “guaranteed.” There’s a helpful article over on ZDNet that will walk you through how to find Microsoft’s compatibility-checking utility.

You may also be surprised at the things Windows 10 will remove from your system as part of the Win10 upgrade.

And bear in mind that if you just happily accept the automatic upgrade to Win10, you’re also opting in for all new features, security updates, and other fixes to the operating system for “the supported lifetime” of your PC. These will all be free, but you won’t have a choice as to which updates you do or don’t get – they’ll all be pushed to you via Windows Update. Businesses, whether running Windows Pro or Enterprise, will have more control over how and when new features and fixes roll out to their users, as Mary Jo Foley explains over on ZDNet.

Finally, Ed Bott is maintaining a great Win10 FAQ over on ZDNet that he’s been updating regularly as more information becomes available. You might want to bookmark that one and come back to it occasionally.

I confess that I’m kind of excited about the new release, and I’ll probably upgrade to it as soon as the Win10 Enterprise bits show up on our Microsoft Partner portal. It will be interesting to see how these major changes in how the Windows OS will be distributed and updated will play out over time. How about you? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below…

Posted in: Licensing, Microsoft, Windows 10 ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Licensing Office in a Remote Desktop Environment - Updated

January 12, 2015 12:00 pm ⋅ 29 Comments ⋅

Update - January 19, 2015
After posting the last update a week ago, I spent more time rooting around the Microsoft Web site, and ended up in a relatively painful 45-minute chat session with a Microsoft “Licensing Specialist.” A large portion of that time was spent just trying to get said Licensing Specialist to understand the question I was asking. Ultimately, I had to give up on my attempt to get an answer as to why Microsoft still had a live link to a Volume License Brief that appeared to be out of date and that apparently contained information that was no longer valid…because the Licensing Specialist couldn’t get to the document in question. According to her, when she clicked on the link below, she received an error message stating that the document had been removed from the Microsoft Web site. As I write this update, the link to the 2009 Volume License Brief is still live, and I just verified that the document is still there. I will leave it to you to figure out why I can still get to it but she couldn’t. She offered to have a Microsoft manager call me the next day. It’s been a week now, and I have yet to receive that call. (It’s possible that the manager attempted to call me, but, if so, did not leave a voice mail message.)

In the absence of any other information at this point, my best advice is to assume that this Volume License Brief supersedes the information in the earlier one (even though the earlier one is still available on Microsoft’s Web site), and that, to be on the safe side, you should insure that, if you are accessing Office applications via RDS, the edition and version on your RDS server(s) match the licenses you have for your client devices.
…end January 19 update…

Update - January 12, 2015
A few days ago, Markus challenged my statement (see comment below) that it was permissible to access Office Standard via Remote Desktop Services if your client was licensed for Office Pro Plus, and that it was also permissible to access an older version (e.g., Office 2010 Pro Plus) via Remote Desktop Services if your client was licensed for a newer version (e.g., Office 2013 Pro Plus). I can state definitively that this was the case, as recently as November, 2009. This Microsoft Volume License Brief, originally published in 2007, and updated in November of 2009, contained the following graphic (click to enlarge):


This graphic clearly shows that it was permissible to access Office Standard from a client device licensed with Office Pro Plus, and that it was permissible to access an older version of Office from a client device licensed with a newer version. However, a later Volume License Brief suggests that this may have changed. I am attempting to get clarification from Microsoft, and will update this post again as I get more information.
…end Jan. 12 update…

Judging from the questions we continue to be asked, lots of people are confused about how to license the Microsoft Office Suite if you are accessing it via Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services (a.k.a. Terminal Services) and/or Citrix XenApp. Hopefully, this will help clear up the confusion. We’ve also updated this post to include information about how to license the applications in a Cloud hosting environment.

First of all, it is important to keep in mind that desktop applications such as the Office Suite are licensed per device, not per user. According to the latest Microsoft “Product Use Rights” document dated April, 2014, a “Licensed Device” is “the single physical hardware system to which a license is assigned.”

That begs the question of what “assigned” means, and the answer - particularly for devices like thin clients, where you couldn’t install the application locally if you wanted to - is that you are on the honor system. You decide, in the privacy of your own conscience, which licenses you are assigning to which devices - with the caveat that, if you’re ever audited, you’d better be able to produce a license for every device people are using to run Office apps. You can reassign a license from one device to another, but not more often than every 90 days, unless it’s due to permanent hardware failure.

Once you’ve assigned each license you acquire to a device, you have the following rights (again quoting from the Product Use Rights document, with my commentary in italics):

  • You may install the software on the Licensed Device and a network Server.
  • Unless you license the software as an Enterprise Product or on a company-wide basis, you may also install the software on a single portable device. That would cover a user who, for example, had both a desktop PC and a notebook PC.
  • Each license permits only one user to access and use the software at a time. So, technically, it would be a license violation for someone else to run Office on your desktop PC while you’re in a hotel somewhere running it on your “portable device.”
  • Local use of the software running on the Licensed Device is permitted for any user. So it’s OK to let someone else use your desktop PC to run Office, as long as you’re not simultaneously running it on your “portable device.”
  • Local use of the software running on a portable device is permitted for the primary user of the Licensed Device. So, technically, it would be a license violation for you to let someone else run Office on your “portable device” under any circumstances.
  • Remote use of the software running on the Licensed Device is permitted for the primary user of that device from any device or for any other user from another Licensed Device. So if your Licensed Device is your desktop PC, it’s OK for you to use GoToMyPC or some similar remote access method to access and run that copy of Office, using whatever kind of client device you want - including, say, an iPad. However, any other user could not remotely access your desktop PC to run that copy of Office unless they were doing so from another Licensed Device.
  • And now the most important point relative to the subject at hand… Remote use of the software running on a network Server is permitted for any user from a Licensed Device. A Remote Desktop Server falls under the definition of a “network Server.” So any user who is accessing Office via Remote Desktop Services must be doing so from a Licensed Device.

In other words, if you can walk up to a device and use it to access a Remote Desktop Server and run Office, you must have an Office license for that device. It doesn’t matter whether that device is a PC or laptop that has the Office bits installed on its local hard drive, or whether it is a thin client device that only knows how to connect to a XenApp server, you need to have “assigned” a license to that device.

It’s also important to note that all of the above came from the Product Use Rights document for Microsoft Volume Licenses. You do not, never have had, and probably never will have the right to access Office on an RDS or XenApp server from a device that has an OEM Office license installed on it. If your PC or laptop came from the manufacturer with Office pre-installed on it, then you have an OEM license, and you do not have “network storage and use” rights. There is an excellent blog post over on the Microsoft SMB Community Blog that explains this in detail. Yes, it’s an old post (from July, 2005). No, the policy hasn’t changed.

Things get a bit more complicated when you move to the Cloud. For example, if you are a VQOffice® customer, and you want to run Office apps on our cloud servers, we can, of course, bundle the Office licenses into your monthly fee under our Microsoft SPLA (“Service Provider License Agreement”). But what if you already own volume licenses for Office? According to the Product Use Rights document, we can use your licenses “provided all such Servers and other devices are and remain fully dedicated to your use.” Given the highly virtualized environments of nearly all Cloud hosting providers (including us), that’s going to drive the cost of the solution up significantly unless you have enough users to justify dedicating hardware in our data center just for your use. For most small businesses, it will be less expensive to pay us for the use of our SPLA licenses than to pay us for dedicated hardware so you can use your own licenses.

What about Office 365? Office 365 is governed by a completely different use rights document - the Online Services Use Rights document. If you read through that document, you will find that, under the E3 plan for example, each user has the rights to activate the Office software on up to five devices, which is a pretty good deal. You will also find the following statement: “Each user may also use one of the five activations on a network server with the Remote Desktop Services (RDS) role enabled…” At first blush, you might think that means you could use your Office 365 E3 licenses to cover running Office apps in our Cloud hosting environment - and you would be right, provided that you’re running on dedicated hardware. So, basically, the same rules apply to Office 365 licenses as apply to volume licenses. We’d be delighted if the rest of the world added their voices to ours to try to get that policy changed.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Microsoft, nor do I define their license terms, which are subject to change, particularly when new product versions are released. I have, however, worked with them for a very long time, and had lots of discussions about what is, or is not, legal under the terms of various license models. The foregoing is my own interpretation of information that is publicly available on the Microsoft Web site - and I have helpfully provided you with links to that information. I highly recommend that, if you have any questions, you download the relevant Product Use Rights document and read it for yourself.

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing, Microsoft, XenApp ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

A New Citrix Trade-Up Program

August 27, 2014 4:10 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

At the recent Citrix Synergy conference, Citrix announced a new product bundle: the Citrix Workspace Suite, which consists of XenDesktop Platinum Edition plus XenMobile Enterprise Edition. The Workspace Suite is only licensed in a per-user model. Also, as we mentioned in an update to our blog post on Citrix Subscription Advantage, it appears that, with the advent of the Workspace Suite, Citrix is continuing to move to a more traditional model of “Software Maintenance,” that covers both product upgrades and 24×7 telephone support. Subscription Advantage by itself is not available for the Workspace Suite.

Purchasing the Workspace Suite does offer a bit of savings compared to purchasing the two products separately. A Workspace Suite license is $450 (MSRP) plus $99 for the required first year of Software Maintenance, for a total acquisition cost of $549. XenDesktop Platinum is $350 per named user, and XenMobile Enterprise is $226 per named user ($185 for the license plus $41 for the required first year of Software Maintenance), so buying the two products separately would cost you $27 more than buying the Workspace Suite.

Now, Citrix has announced a trade-up promotion for existing customers who would like to move to the new Workspace Suite. The cool thing about this promotion is that it is so widely applicable. If you own any version of XenDesktop, XenApp, or XenMobile, or if you own ShareFile Enterprise licenses, you can take advantage of this trade-up. If you own XenDesktop concurrent-use licenses or XenApp licenses (which have always been concurrent), you can get two Workspace Suite licenses for each license you trade up; otherwise it’s a 1 for 1 trade-up.

The trade-up price varies depending on what product you’re trading up from, what edition of that product you own, and whether you’re current on your Subscription Advantage. For example, the XenApp trade-up pricing looks like this:

Advanced Edition Enterprise Edition Platinum Edition
SA Current $373 $323 $298
SA Not Current $423 $373 $348

Note: All prices shown are MSRP and do not include any volume license program discounts.

Citrix is also offering a 10% discount on additional Workspace Suite licenses purchased on the same order as a trade-up, or a 35% discount if you purchase enough additional licenses to cover everyone in your organization.

You can find a handy trade-up calculator at www.citrixinformation.com/cwscalculator that will let you enter your existing license information and tell you what your trade-up will cost.

Posted in: Citrix, Licensing ⋅ Tagged: , , ,

The Elusive Windows “Companion Subscription License” - a Solution In Search of a Problem

July 25, 2014 12:10 pm ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

In our post entitled “What Licenses Do I Need,” we discussed the licensing required, from both Citrix and Microsoft, for a XenApp or XenDesktop deployment. But there was still an unknown factor: When that post was published, Microsoft had recently announced something that, at the time, was being referred to as a “Companion Device License” – but no information was available yet on what it would cost or how it would be licensed.

The fog has finally cleared, and, unfortunately, it’s not particularly good news if you are a Small or Medium Enterprise.

The question at hand is what Microsoft licenses are required to legally operate a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that serves up virtual instances of Windows 7 or Windows 8.x to your users. And the answer is that it depends on what the client device is that will be used to access the virtual desktop. If the client device is a Windows PC covered by Software Assurance, no problem – the right to access a virtual desktop instance is one of the benefits of Software Assurance. But if the client device is a Windows PC that is not covered by Software Assurance, or if it is not a Windows PC at all (e.g., Mac, Linux, thin client, etc.) then you must purchase a Virtual Desktop Access (“VDA”) license for that client device. That VDA license is available through Open Value Subscription licensing for roughly $100/year each.

So far, so good. But things start to get more complicated if you want to access that virtual desktop from a personally-owned client device.

According to the Microsoft Product Use Rights document (on pages 74 & 75 of the April, 2014, edition, in case you want to read along), the primary user of a Windows PC covered by Software Assurance, or of another client device to which a VDA license has been assigned, has “roaming use rights” that allow a virtual desktop to be accessed from a “Qualifying Third Party Device” such as a personal PC, MacBook, iPad, etc…”from anywhere off your or your affiliates’ premises.” And therein lies the problem: The user is not entitled to bring a personal device into the office and use it there to access a virtual desktop.

So, if your objective is to enable BYOD and let your people bring in whatever kind of device they want to use, and then use that device to access your virtual desktop infrastructure, what do you have to do? This question is what Microsoft attempted to address with what is now called a “Windows Companion Subscription License.” But it doesn’t address it very well. First of all, the Companion SL must be associated with another client device that is…yep, either a Windows PC with Software Assurance or some other client device that you’ve assigned a VDA license to. For every one of those you have, you can purchase a Companion SL, which will entitle the primary user of that device to access a virtual desktop from up to four Companion Devices in any given 90 day period. Therefore, the Companion SL doesn’t truly enable BYOD in the sense of eliminating the need to purchase company-owned client devices that are covered by either Software Assurance or a VDA license – because you have to have one of those before you can even purchase a Companion SL.

To make matters worse, unless your organization is large enough to have a Microsoft Enterprise, Select, or Select Plus agreement, you’re out of luck, because the Companion SL is not available through any Open License program. So, if you’re an SMB, your only option for legally licensing employee-owned devices for use on your premises to access your virtual desktop infrastructure is to purchase VDA licenses for those employee-owned devices.

If you do have an Enterprise or Select agreement, you can expect to pay an estimated $48 - $84 per year for a Companion SL, depending on your agreement, the size of your organization, and the concessions you’ve been able to wrangle out of your Microsoft account rep. So that may offer some cost savings for large enterprises that want to institute a BYOD policy – although it’s not clear to me how great the savings would be considering that you have to have a client device with either Software Assurance or a VDA license before you can even purchase the Companion SL.

For most organizations, in our opinion, the Companion SL is a solution in search of a problem.

Posted in: Licensing, Microsoft, VDI, XenDesktop ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Citrix Subscription Advantage

June 26, 2014 9:00 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

Update 6/26/2014:
There was an interesting announcement at the recent Citrix Synergy conference that may indicate the future direction of Subscription Advantage. At that conference, Citrix announced a new product bundle called the “Citrix Workspace Suite,” which consists of XenDesktop Platinum Edition + XenMobile Enterprise Edition. It does not appear that Subscription Advantage, as we have known it for lo these many years, exists for this product. Instead, Citrix appears to have moved to a more traditional (in the software industry) Software Maintenance model that includes product upgrades and 7 x 24 telephone support.

The list price for the Workspace Suite is $450 per named user (there is no concurrent-use license model for this product), plus $99/user/year for Software Maintenance. Software Maintenance is mandatory for the first year (so the first year cost is actually $549/user, not $450…less whatever discount you can get on the license itself) and optional for subsequent years. But it appears that if you choose not to renew Software Maintenance, you will also lose your access to product upgrades, just as has been the case with Software Assurance.

***** End Update *****

I’ve noticed a pattern developing: It starts with a renewal notice, usually around 90-days before Subscription Advantage (SA) is set to expire. The reply email comes back within 48 hours: “What is Subscription Advantage?” I answer and then comes question #2: “Why do I need it?” So I think it’s time once again to shed some light on this mystical annual renewal.

Subscription Advantage IS NOT MAINTENANCE!

Subscription Advantage  IS NOT SUPPORT!

Subscription Advantage IS NOT A WARRANTY!

Ok, now that that is out of the way we can focus on what SA is because it is important that you know exactly what you are paying for. Citrix SA is annual license upgrade protection. The first year is included with your license purchase - after that, there’s an annual renewal cost. What does that mean? Well it means that you bought something that is not a set-it-and-forget-it item. Data centers grow and change all time and the tools used in that data center need to change as well. So as the Citrix products evolve (or change names) you as an owner of “upgrade protection” can take advantage of these upgrades, period.

(There is one exception: it is now possible to purchase a bundle of SA and Citrix telephone support for XenApp. We covered this in an earlier blog post.)

The good news is that Citrix SA doesn’t cost as much as traditional “Software Maintenance” from companies that bundle some kind of telephone support with their upgrade protection. The general rule of SA is that it costs about 11% - 13% per year of the cost of the license. In our experience, traditional Software Maintenance that includes support will typically run you 18% - 20% per year for 5 x 8 support, and 25%+ per year for 7 x 24 support.

However, if you have not renewed your SA and wish to upgrade you will need to pay a reinstatement fee or just buy new licenses. Which option is best for you will depend on how long it’s been since you renewed SA. If your SA has been expired for more than a year, it’s going to be pretty expensive to try to get it reinstated.

Citrix upgrades its products often! So what if I have my own Citrix expert on staff and don’t plan on upgrading for 5-6 years anyway? Well, as we all know, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. What about the rest of your data center? Do you not plan to upgrade that in the next 5-6 years either? In many cases old versions of Citrix products will not be compatible with new technology releases. E.g., Citrix just released XenApp 6, which is specifically designed for Windows Server 2008 R2. Earlier versions of XenApp are not compatible with 2008 R2.

Also, Citrix frequently releases “Feature Packs” for older product versions that add functionality (within the technological constraints of the older platform). If your SA is current, you can take advantage of the new features. If not, you…can’t.

Finally, no software company can afford to indefinitely support every product version that they’ve ever released. Everything has a lifecycle. For example, Presentation Server v4.0 hit the “End of Life” point at the end of 2009. That means there is no support available for the product other than the information you may be able to dig out of the Citrix on-line Knowledge Base. Furthermore, all the downloads have been removed, so you have no way to access any security patches, service packs, hotfixes, etc. This is obviously not a good situation for your production environment - so if you’re still running Presentation Server v4.0, you should be working toward upgrading your environment as soon as you possibly can.

Bottom Line: I recommend SA renewal to everyone who buys Citrix licenses. As the person who handles all the renewal notices for our customers, I have, time and time again, seen people try to save a dollar this year but end up spending more then necessary next year. Plus it is just a headache to realize that you need to upgrade - perhaps to solve a problem that (naturally) surfaced after hours or on a weekend - but can’t get the upgrade because your subscription has expired. So, when you get that email notice from me, just remember: I’m really trying to make your life easier by insuring that you’re upgrade rights are protected!

Posted in: Citrix, General, Licensing ⋅ Tagged: , ,