Its important to understand your obligations and entitlements on contracts you sign with any Vendor. Microsoft is no different. In recent audit defence activities we have observed some Gotchas that are not so obvious such as:
Bring Your Own Licences (BYOL) – MSP’s have responsibilities and liabilities
If you are an MSP providing a service for your clients to BYO and deploy their own licences, you are still responsible for the deployment and usage of these licences.
If you are an end user and you own licences for some Microsoft products which you are deploying on a cloud platform with a Managed Service Provider, they are still responsible for your deployment and usage of the licences which you own.
In a recent audit a client with an SPLA Hosting Agreement had clients BYO and deploy their own licences for Visual Studio. Visual Studio is not eligible for License Mobility so in this instance the SPLA hoster had to pay for the BYOL licences deployed on their platform by their client.
Under the terms of the SPLA Licence Mobility addendum they were expected to investigate and remedy any non compliance from their clients and provide Licence Mobility end user forms on request to Microsoft. The result was that while the client of the MSP had already owned and paid for these licences, the MSP was also liable for payment for the same licences.
What many clients are not aware of is that Microsoft require the SPLA hosting provider to have an agreement in place with their End Users.
The Pricing Calculations microsoft Apply for Non Compliant software
In an audit defence exercise involving one of our customers we queried the term “the then current price” on the Microsoft agreement they had signed.
Don’t assume that Microsoft applies the price prevailing at the time of the non compliance finding. In reality Microsoft apply their price calculations based on the price at the time of verification of non-compliance, not at the time of the breach.
The nett effect is that if you are audited and found to be non compliant 2 years prior to the audit, the pricing applied is 125% of the price at the time the breach is identified. You are likely to pay more for these licences as the pricing would have increased over the 2 years since the breach.
Usage Rights for Office Applications such as Standard and Office Professional Plus under a SPUR Agreement
There is a common misconception that an Office Professional Plus licence entitles a customer the right to use Office Standard as a permitted lower edition.
Microsoft Universal Licencing Terms do not permit down edition rights to Office Standard in their SPUR. Office Processional Plus does not provide cross-edition downgrade rights to Office Standard. They are two separate products and need to be licenced as such.
Full details of Microsoft’s SPUR Universal Licence Terms can be found in the link below:
https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/spur/product/universallicenseterms/all
Targetbase assists customers with expert Software Licence Practitioners who have extensive experience in helping customers optimise and defend their Microsoft software estate. For a confidential discussion about your Microsoft Licences please email sueh@targetbaseintegrated.com.