Tuesday 11 May 2010

Licensing Microsoft Office in Terminal Services

This post has an update here: Further to Licensing Office in a Terminal Services Environment.

This one is a bit of a brain buster to figure out, though Eric Ligman has done a great job of clarifying the way to properly license Microsoft Office in a Terminal Services environment:

Essentially:

  1. Office is licensed per _desktop_ _device_ accessing the application no matter where the application is installed.
  2. Open Licensing provides the rights to run Office in a Terminal Services environment.

So, we have a client that we are setting up that has a combined total 22 users in their Active Directory with 11 physical machines on the network and 11 users connecting remotely via TS Gateway on SBS to their internal Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Terminal Server.

Office and their Line of Business application will be delivered via TS RemoteApps as well as Remote Desktop Services for certain users that require a desktop to work from.

All 11 systems will have Office and all 11 TS users will be accessing Office on the Terminal Server so we will be providing them with a sum total of 22 Open Value based licenses.

A couple of key Office Open Value part numbers:

  • Office 2007/2010 Open Value 3 Year Agreement with 3 Payments
    • 021-07257: Office 2007/2010 Standard
    • 269-09046: Office 2007/2010 Professional Plus

The Microsoft License Advisor site:

There are three physical servers on this particular network with SBS 2008 Premium and Windows Server 2008 R2 being licensed with an Open Value Agreement.

UPDATE: Eric kindly e-mailed us with some clarifications based on our client situation mentioned in this post. His thoughts are developed with some examples in our post Further to Licensing Office in a Terminal Services Environment.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The licensing being on a Device basis, if I have a user with a PC. Office is installed on it, with an appropriate Open VL. Exactly the same version of Office is installed on the TS server. Is this user allowed to access from his own PC the TS and run Office ?

Put in another way, user X has the appropriate licence for his computer to use Office on the TS server, can he install a copy of the SAME Office on his computer ?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Secondary Use Rights. That is the way to get that covered. Open License provides for this.

Eric Ligman on Office Licensing.

Philip