Volume Licensing

Solve-IT Newsletter

Volume 1 Issue 9

Volume Licensing

By Ed Duncan, Consultant, SBSC, MCSE, MCSA

As businesses look for ways to keep costs down, one effective solution that small organizations should consider is volume licensing when making software purchases. The concept behind volume licensing is to lower your overall per license cost by purchasing licenses in bulk, similar to shopping at Costco's or BJ's. The higher the quantity of items purchased, the lower the individual price of the item.

Let me stop here and explain a common misconception many people have regarding software and licenses. When you purchase a software application you are actually purchasing a license. Software is protected under intellectual property laws, the same as music and literature. You don't own the software. You are purchasing a license giving you the legal right to install and run a copy of the software on your computer.

There are different types of licenses. If you buy a software product off the shelf, you are purchasing a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license. The software can only be installed on one computer, however you are usually allowed to transfer the license to another computer if you uninstall it from the first computer. If you buy a computer with software preinstalled, that's an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) license. The software that's preinstalled on the computer cannot be installed on another computer. The OEM usually provide the software in the form of a recovery CD or DVD, so if anything happens to the application requiring a reinstall, you can pop in the provided CD/DVD.

With volume licensing you purchase multiple licenses of the same application. This makes sense when everyone in the organization is running the same applications, and is cheaper than buying multiple retail copies of the same application. There are usually additional benefits offered by the manufacturer when purchasing software under a volume licensing program. In most cases you must purchase the licenses through a reseller, and nearly every software manufacturer offers some form of a volume licensing program with different terms, so pay close attention to the details.

The minimum number required to make a volume license purchase is usually 5, so any small business with at least 5 employees (or computers) can take advantage of volume licensing benefits. Many do not for various reasons. One reason is that many small businesses purchase software from OEM's at the time they purchase their computer. The value to doing this is that OEM prices are lower than buying the software application off the shelf or over the Internet, and very little configuration is required to get the computer up and running. The downside to this is that compatibility becomes an issue when computers in the organization run different versions of the same application. Keeping track of licenses and product keys can become challenging since each computer will have its own individual license and product key.

Large organizations handle this differently. Most purchase computers and replace the preinstalled operating system and applications with their own purchased operating system and applications usually from a corporate desktop image. Some corporations create a desktop image and send it to the OEM's to install on the computers for them when they make the purchase. In any event the large corporation use some form of volume licensing for the operating system and applications they have installed on their computers.

There are several benefits for using a volume licensing program for software purchases:

Cost savings - You receive better pricing when buying in larger quantities than purchasing individual items at retail.
Easier product key manageability - You receive one product key for all the licenses purchased. This makes it much easier installing software on computers when you only need one product key instead of a unique key for each computer.
Licenses are transferrable - If you decide to replace some computers in the office, you can transfer the software volume licenses to the new computers. OEM software licenses are not transferrable.
Prices are locked in - With some programs prices are locked in during the term of the agreement so you don't have to worry about price increases if you need to purchase additional licenses.
Payment plans - Some manufacturers will allow you to spread out your payments over the length of the agreement instead of paying for everything up front.
Free or discount upgrades - If a new software version is released during the term of the agreement, some manufacturers will allow you to upgrade for free, or at a discounted price.
Technical support - Some manufacturers offer free technical support or priority support to their volume license customers.

So what should a small business owner be aware of before signing a volume license agreement? Most programs are subscription based that require a 2 or 3 year commitment. Some manufacturers may require you to purchase licenses in specific quantities (ex. pack of 10, 25, or 50). If your company has only 8 employees, a pack of 10 licenses would force you to pay for 2 extra licenses that won't be used. Not all programs work this way, some will allow you to purchase the exact number of licenses needed, so check with your reseller.

Technology Spotlight: Firefox 3.5

I've been using the latest Firefox browser for over a month now. In terms of performance Mozilla claims that Firefox performs faster than Internet Explorer 8. I've noticed a slight performance increase with pages loading in Firefox, but it's not very noticeable to the untrained eye. In terms of features, both Internet Explorer and Firefox are roughly the same. Firefox has a few features that Internet Explorer lacks and vice-versa.

One of those features is the Tab Tearing feature. This feature allows you to drag and drop a tabbed browser page into its own window. This comes in handy for users with multiple monitors. If you want to view two web pages at a time, you just drag and drop the tabbed page onto the second monitor.

Firefox offers a Recently Closed Tabs and Recently Closed Windows, so if you accidently close a web page, you can quickly get back to what you had open, or if a problem forces you to close the brower, you can reopen all the tabbed pages you had open.

In Internet Explorer, when you clear the browser history, it's an "all or none" type of deal. In Firefox you can erase all or selectively pick which sites to erase from history. I haven't quite figured out the benefit for doing this unless you want to remove a site from history without making it appear suspicious by erasing all of them.

Location Awareness is another big feature for Firefox, however it was hard to find many sites supporting it. Location Awareness allows sites to return information that is relevant to you based on your physical location. For example, if you do a search for restaurants, the results will return restaurants closest to you. There's a web plug-in called Loki that does the same thing, and it can be used by Internet Explorer and Firefox. The Weatherbug site for example, uses Loki to determine your location and report weather details for your area. Overall the new Firefox browser is worth a look as a good alternative to Internet Explorer.

Tips & Tricks: Passphrase Instead of Password

Sometimes a system password is the only barrier between an attacker and your sensitive information. A weak password is one of the ways anyone can become compromised or a victim of identity theft. The problem most of us have with passwords is that they are easy to forget, especially on networks where you are required to change them periodically.

When a password is easy to forget, we tend to write it down. If you leave it someplace easy to find, under the keyboard is a common place, or inside a desk drawer, or taped to the computer, you are making it very easy for someone to log on as you. Keep in mind that most threats companies face are internal, not external (disgruntled employees, employees who inadvertently leak sensitive information, visitors given access to systems unsupervised, etc). Also keep in mind that Windows by default will show the logon name of the last user logged on, so it's important to use a complex password. A regular English language password can be subjected to dictionary attacks and cracked. You'd be surprised at how many people use the word "password" as their password.

Complex passwords are difficult to crack. A complex password has a combination of:

uppercase character
lowercase character
number
special character

Since passwords sometimes are easy to forget, why not try using passphrases instead. For example:

MiamiDolphinsNumber1

is an example of a passphrase. It's harder to crack because it's longer than a password, and easy to remember if you're a Miami Dolphins fan, so you don't need to write it down. This passphrase meets 3 out of the 4 requirements for password complexity. There are no special characters in this passphrase.

Here's another example:

ARealAmericanHero!

This is another easy to remember passphrase if you happen to be a GI Joe fan. This passphrase also meets 3 out of 4 requirements for complexity. We have a special character in this passphrase but no numbers. To satisfy all 4 requirements let's substitute the number "3" for every lowercase "e". Now our passphrase is:

AR3alAm3ricanH3ro!

Now we've created a very complex password that is still easy to remember and very difficult for anyone to crack. You can turn just about anything into a passphrase; a song title, your favorite book, the type of car you drive, your imagination is the limit. Now there is no crack-proof password technique, but passphrases can make it very difficult for an attacker, and fun for yourself.