I went through a Microsoft SAM audit in 2012. Started in April and ended in September. I've been with the same company for 15 years and good documentation saved us on a few things. In the end we had to purchase a few licenses. If you have any questions along the way, I'd be happy to try and answer them.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J- P Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 2:40 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Thanks for the clarification, and I appreciate the feedback , for once i actually interpreted something correclty from MS licensing. ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2014 19:28:21 +0000 That's not the way on-premises Exchange licensing works. It's per-user or per-device. Just like Server CALs. It doesn't matter how many mailboxes there are. Or how many AD accounts there are. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 2:45 PM To: '[email protected]' Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Or, if there's only one person that any of those applies to, you could set them up as DLs... not ideal, but it would work and not count against licensing. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Art DeKneef Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2014 11:15 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? What does the version of Exchange Product Use Rights they are using say? These would be considered shared mailboxes? From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J- P Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 10:51 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? So I started my audit on the client site with Exchange, and I noticed that they created all mail accounts as user mailboxes; For instance, warehouse@, jobs@ , dropbox@, voicemail@ etc... My question is will this be scrutinized and will MS say "it's a user box, therefore it requires a CAL"? ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:58:15 +0000 Doesn't matter. Buried in the legalese of license agreements, MS states that they can request this info at any time... And all associated costs are the customer's responsibility. As long as you are not intentionally violating their licensing, they are not out to punish/fine you - just get you legit. In any case, good luck. Source: went through this exact thing in '12. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J- P Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 12:38 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? One thing I'm sure the client will note is; "MS_Rep_Name" will contact Business_Name to discuss the internal self audit, SHOULD YOUR ORG ELECT TO ENGAGE OUTSIDE RESOURCES O ASSIST YOU IN THE INTERNAL AUDIT MICROSOFT NOT FUND THOSE RESOURCES" Jean-Paul Natola ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:28:03 +0000 Vs. doing it free? Absolutely. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of J- P Sent: Monday, March 31, 2014 12:05 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Being a consultant to them, would you make this a billable task? Jean-Paul Natola ________________________________ Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 11:56:23 -0400 From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] SOT: Letter from MS, legitimacy ? Be prepared for a hair pulling experience. When we did the "It's not an audit, we're here to help you manage your licenses" they ended up doing lots of aggravating things. Stuff like not wanting to accept the idea that OEM XP licenses on a bunch of old HP machines were valid since neither our accounting or the reseller's records went back far enough to be able to produce an invoice. I think they finally dropped that when we came up with an email acknowledgement from the purchase and took pictures of a number of the COA stickers on some of the boxes. Then there was them saying we needed to purchase something like 20 cores of SQL Server 2012. We were running 2008r2, properly licensed and even with the 2012 transition, we were still properly licensed. I ended up quoting them the relevant sections from the SQL 2012 licensing document about a dozen times before they got it. There was several other dumb things. I've heard that this is being driven from the sales side of Microsoft as a revenue enhancement tool. I didn't see anything that would make me think that's not the case. ________________________________ Hi all One of my new clients called me and said they received a letter via Fedex from MS, regarding licensing. In my 15+ years I have never had that occur before , I asked them to email me the letter so I can take a look at it. They only recently (within the last year) gone to Volume Licensing for Windows/Exchange/outlook and TS cals/licensing, all desktops are desktops are OEM licensed. They are also a small company (maybe 40 desktops ) and a handful of servers. Has anyone on here ever been contacted in this manner? Jean-Paul Natola -- Thanks, Joe Matuscak | Director of Technology Rohrer Corporation | Office: 330-335-1541 717 Seville Road | Wadsworth, Ohio 44281 www.rohrer.com<http://www.rohrer.com> | A Better Package .
