Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Consider this "Office Licensing 101".  The question on some customer’s minds is:

"We have an Enterprise Agreement.  (Or "We have Office with Software Assurance")
What edition of Office 2007 does my company get when Office 2007 releases?"

Here’s the quick answer.   If your company has the Office Suite on either Software Assurance or your company has an Enterprise Agreement (with the Desktop CAL which implicitly means your org has Software Assurance), you get the following analogous product when we release the Office 2007 Suite:

• OfficeStd2003+SA ——-afterOffice2007releases——> OfficeStd2007+SA 
  OfficeStd2007+SA ——-payPROStepUptoUpgrade—–> OfficePro2007+SA
  OfficeStd2007+SA ——-payENTStepUptoUpgrade—–> OfficeEnt2007+SA
• OfficePro2003+SA ——-afterOffice2007releases——> OfficePro2007Plus+SA
  OfficePro2007+SA ——-payENTStepUptoUpgrade—–> OfficeEnt2007+SA

(For more on the differences between each Edition of Office 2007, go here.)

For instance: 

"1000 Office Standard licenses on Software Assurance"
If your company have a 1000 licenses of Office Standard on Software Assurance, with Office 2007 releases, you will get the right to deploy 1000 licenses of Office Standard 2007 in place of whatever licenses you have deployed.

If your company wants Office Professional 2007, they may pay a "PRO step up" fee for each existing Office Standard license to convert these licenses to "Pro", so you can deploy Office Professional 2007.

If your company wants Office Enterprise 2007, they may pay an "ENTERPRISE step up" fee for each existing Standard license to convert these licenses to "Enterprise", so you can deploy Office Enterprise 2007.

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For those of you who are lost and are wondering, what’s Software Assurance (SA)?  What’s an Enterprise Agreement (EA)?:

Definition:  "Software Assurance"
Software Assurance (SA) is a special, low-priced fee that is paid ANNUALLY (usually a 3 year contract) in addition to the costs of a traditional software license.  SA gives a company the right to upgrade to whatever analogous version of the product that gets released during the duration of the contract.  SA licensing also provides a TON of additional, very tangible benefits to customers such as complimentary Training, Discounted Employee Purchasing of Microsoft products, Home Use Licensing, Microsoft eLearning computer-based training, etc.  In fact, recently a huge new benefit of SA licensing was added to the glee of our SA customer:  The opportunity to purchase the Desktop Optimization Pack. 
Read more here:  http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1352.entry?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=blogpart#permalink

Definition:  "Enterprise Agreement"
An Enterprise Agreement (EA) is a special contract established between a customer and Microsoft that provides them with discounted licensing that sometimes exceeds that of traditional volume discounting.  In addition, EAs are paid for over a period of time, usually 3 years, allowing people to spread the cost of their licenses over a longer period of time.  EA customers purchase (among other things) two specially packaged/discounted licenses:  Desktop Client Access License (CAL) and the Core Client Access License CAL.  The Desktop CAL consists of a Windows Desktop OS License & an Office License.  (Std or Pro… depends on the contract)  The Core CAL traditionally contains Windows Server CAL, SMS CAL, Exchange CAL, and a Sharepoint CAL.