Work PCs to miss out on key Vista features
Volume licence users of Windows will be looking eagerly at the opportunity to upgrade to Vista. But while Business or Enterprise versions might make sense from a deployment and management perspective, they don’t include features which you know corporate and education users will want, like DVD Maker.
Working in a school, I know how popular creative applications are for both teachers and students, so I assumed that we’d simply have to bite the financial bullet and look at rolling out Vista Ultimate as our Volume SOE.
Wrong. It seems that only the Business and Enterprise editions are available for Volume License customers.
This left me in the position of either having to tell staff that they couldn’t use the more interesting new features of Vista (the bits they are actually looking forward to), or face the prospect of purchasing licenses for individual Home Premium or Ultimate machines.
The situation was really looking like a total pain, so I got in touch with Microsoft for clarification, and a spokesperson got back to me today.
APC: “Can you please confirm that Windows Vista Enterprise and Windows Vista Business are the only editions available for volume licensing?”
Microsoft: “Windows Vista Business is the edition that is available to all volume license customers, and volume license customers with Software Assurance [SA] agreements also receive exclusive rights to use Windows Vista Enterprise.
For customers with SA agreements, we have also provided access to use Windows Vista Ultimate for specific scenarios, but we recommend that these customers standardise on Windows Vista Enterprise as it is easier to deploy and manage and is best suited for business environments.”
APC: “What happens when a volume licensing customer requires a particular feature which is only available in the retail version? For example, a user wants to be able to make DVDs (Windows Vista’s DVD Maker is not available in either of the business editions.)”
Microsoft: “We recognise that some enterprises may want the use of certain consumer-oriented features for certain unique settings, such as for conference rooms or for media-related labs, etc.
Customers with SA agreements can take advantage of Windows Vista Ultimate to address these special cases.
Non SA customers can purchase a PC with Windows Vista Ultimate pre-installed from their OEM, they can purchase retail licenses to upgrade existing machines, or they can look into one of the many third-party applications that will be part of the Windows Vista ecosystem to meet their needs.
Because of the superior manageability and deployment functionality of Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Enterprise, we recommend that organisations standardise on either of these versions of Windows Vista.”
So I suppose it’s not all bad news. As an organisation you do have to purchase Software Assurance to get the flexibility to use Vista Ultimate in those “unique settings” so you’re looking at an extra cost per unit there.
Businesses are going to have to assess whether the extra cost is worth the benefit – both of being able to upgrade to Vista Enterprise and get Ultimate when needed, versus simply purchasing Ultimate should the need arise.
From my perspective, we are going down the Software Assurance path, but we’re also taking part in a School’s Agreement with Microsoft, which I believe is worked out between Microsoft and the Department of Education, which enables us to install any version of Vista regardless of the OEM operating system purchased.
So we can upgrade an XP Professional machine to Vista Ultimate mid-cycle without causing any licensing problems.
This will actually be of massive benefit in the XP-Vista migration, as we can purchase XP machines at the start of the year, without having to rush to get a Vista-based SOE ready, and then simply upgrade to Vista during the year on a schedule of our choosing.
Microsoft is right in their assessment of the situation though – there’s really no call to make any other versions of Vista available for volume licensing because it’s simply not appropriate.
Home Basic and Premium aren’t geared towards operating in a business environment and Ultimate is, to be honest, overkill.
Although it will be a pain to have to support some disparate machines running Ultimate, mainly because they won’t have KMS activation keys, it’s a better situation than needing to purchase third-party products to provide functionality which is not available in Business/Enterprise, but which is available in the other versions.
