Windows Vista product activation for volume license customers

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Working mostly with corporate clients has one significant advantage – I’ve largely been shielded from Windows product activation, as I’ve generally had access to volume licence keys (VLKs) – also known as volume activation (VA) 1.0; however with Windows Vista and VA 2.0, this looks set to change and there seems to be a lot of misinformation on the subject (e.g. rumours of enterprises having to run licence servers on Windows Longhorn Server, which is still a beta product and hence not recommended for production use). With that in mind, I thought I’d write a bit on the subject to (hopefully) clear up any confusion.

At a Microsoft event today, Microsoft UK’s James O’Neill was reluctant to discuss this (in my experience, Microsoft consultants and evangelists do tend to shy away from anything remotely related to licencing) but luckily I got chatting to Scotty McLeod from Perot Systems, who was extremely helpful and knowledgeable on the subject.

Scotty explained to me (and others) how the arrangements for corporate product activation will work. Basically, Microsoft has two systems for volume license customers:

  • Multiple activation keys (MAKs) will be made available, with each key valid for a defined number of installations. Activation will require contact to Microsoft servers and, once the maximum number of activations has been reached, the key will be prevented from activating any further copies of Windows. That sounds fair enough but these keys should be guarded closely (more closely than traditional VLKs) because if a key is leaked and administrators do install unofficially, Microsoft is unlikely to “unlicence” a machine. In effect, if you release the key and it gets misused, then it’s your problem!
  • Volume licence keys (VLKs) require that an organisation maintains its own key management server (KMS) – ideally two – to act as a proxy between Microsoft’s licencing servers and enterprise clients, validating and activating Windows Vista computers. Each client actively searches out an appropriate KMS for activation, which must occur within 30 days, retrying every 22 hours. If activation fails, then the installation will run in reduced functionality mode (RFM). Then, every 180 days, the Windows Vista computer will reactivate, with a 30 day grace period before reduced functionality mode is enforced. Effectively, Windows Vista machines will need to reactivate approximately every 6 months. Group policy can be used to control the warnings experienced by users.

So, when would administrators want to use MAKs and when would they use VLKs? MAKs only require activation once (unless there are a lot of hardware changes) and so are ideal for organisations with a dispersed user population that rarely contacts the corporate network. For the majority of users in most organisations that regularly connect to a corporate network then VLKs will probably be more appropriate.

There are some gotchas with VLKs though – for example, a multinational organisation with local purchasing policies will probably have many volume license agreements and will need to implement 2 KMS servers per territory. This is for two reasons:

  • To retain control and stop one territory from using all the licences purchased by another.
  • Because license prices vary globally and licencing terms generally prevent low cost licenses from one territory from being deployed in another.

KMSs also require Windows Vista or Windows Server codenamed Longhorn – with installation being performed via a script within the operating system installation (no GUI interface is provided). Fortunately, Microsoft also provides web-based reporting tools for VLKs, including computer names and how long is left until license expiry. One more positive aspect of the VLK arrangements is that if a licence is not successfully reactivated, then it returns to the pool – so if a laptop is stolen, then at least the licence will be returned within six months or so!

So, that’s Windows Vista product activation for corporate users in a nutshell. The Microsoft website has more information on VA 2.0 (as well as an FAQ) and there’s a My Digital Life article that also has information on the software protection platform (SPP), which is the version of product activation that users who are not subject to volume licence agreements will encounter.

Why Windows Vista doesn’t mean that XP is dead (yet)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last night, I wrote a post about how Windows Vista is finally here but that Windows XP users are long overdue a service pack. Well, having read it again in the cold light of day, I think I should add some clarification.

I’m not suggesting that organisations stick with Windows XP for an extended period (I believe that Gartner has suggested corporates wait until 2008 – although many organisations will have been looking at Vista for a while now and will be ready to upgrade before then). All I’m saying is “great, Vista is here, but we’ve been waiting for a service pack for XP for over 2 years and now you’re telling me it won’t be here until 2008”. After all, based on XP SP1 and SP2 release dates, we should have seen SP3 already and be looking at SP4 soon.

I also appreciate that even Microsoft doesn’t have infinite resources and that the Windows product group have been pretty busy with Windows Vista, Windows Server codenamed Longhorn, and keeping Windows Server 2003 SP2 on track. Maybe delaying service packs is Microsoft’s way of gently nudging us all towards Vista – after all they don’t want a repeat of the scenario where a report published in the summer of 2005 suggested that there were still more organisations using Windows 2000 than had upgraded to XP (3 and a half years after XP was generally available).

My personal view is that the majority of Windows Vista installations (at least in the first 12 months) will be from consumers and small-medium enterprises (SMEs). Many corporates will receive Vista on new hardware and downgrade to standard operating environments based on Windows XP and once these organisations do start to upgrade, I believe it will mainly be those with Windows 2000 PCs that move first. With that in mind, I figure that XP will be around for a while yet, regardless of Microsoft’s support lifecycle policy, which currently says that “Mainstream support will end two years after the next version of this product is released. Extended support will end five years after mainstream support ends”.

If Windows 2000 is anything to go by, then there will be many organisations running unsupported (or extended support) instances of Windows XP for a while yet.

Windows Vista is finally here… but Windows XP SP3 will be 4 years too late

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

They did it! Microsoft finally released Windows Vista to manufacturing today but I have to say I’m a little underwhelmed. Not with the Vista product, which on one level is a great achievement (although I’ve written before about how I’m struggling to find a compelling reason for corporate users to upgrade), but with the way that us Windows XP users have been treated in the interim period.

A few years back, in common with many IT Managers, I signed up to a Microsoft Select agreement including software assurance (SA), but we’ve had no operating system upgrades since Windows XP was launched in 2001 – 5 long years during which our agreements have long since expired (in fact, I left that particular company almost four years ago!).

Sure, we had a pretty major security overhaul in Windows XP service pack 2 (SP2), but that was over two years ago. Last year I speculated about the imminent arrival of Windows XP service pack 3 (SP3), only to be proved wrong and to learn that it was scheduled for 2007. Then, a couple of weeks back, Thomas Lee highlighted that this, long overdue, service pack is now expected in 2008.

I know that many organisations are still trying to swallow SP2 but 4 years to wait for a service pack is just too long (4 years is the expected period between major operating system releases, not a service pack – service packs should be shipped every 6-12 months and should consist of bug fixes, but not new functionality).

Windows Vista will soon be available to volume license subscribers and will soon be the standard for new PCs, but there will be many of us running Windows XP for quite some time yet. Sure, I can download a bunch of individual updates, but surely Microsoft can get a Windows client service pack out of the door sooner than 2008 (Windows Server 2003 SP2 is still scheduled for next spring).

Thanks Microsoft, for your valiant efforts to ship Windows Vista. It’s been a long time coming and I should really be pleased, especially as the media reports that future Windows releases won’t be so spread out; but now, for those of us who paid for SA that we never got the opportunity to use, how about another service pack that we don’t have to wait an age for…

Vista upgrades – don’t confuse Express with Anytime

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another item that I picked up from episode 4 of the Windows Weekly podcast, was that Microsoft has announced two upgrade schemes for Windows Vista – potentially confusing for some prospective purchasers:

  • Windows Vista Express upgrades are intended to allow for upgrades to Windows Vista for anyone who purchases a PC with Windows XP installed over the coming weeks.
  • Windows Vista Anytime upgrades are intended to allow users to upgrade between Windows Vista product editions (e.g. Home Premium to Ultimate).

There’s more information about this at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

Finally, there’s the standard operating system upgrade path from Windows XP to Vista – as far as I know there is no marketing name for that yet!

Why Windows Vista was codenamed “Longhorn”

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Blog posts have been a bit thin on the ground recently – between work and home (new baby + toddler = full days / short nights) I’ve not had much time. Even rarer recently has been anything Microsoft-related – apologies, normal service will be resumed shortly – although short of reporting the news (long awaited release of Windows Defender, impending Windows Media 11 release), which is better left to the likes of Paul Thurrott, there’s not been a lot to say as Microsoft UK events have also been a bit sparse – presumably waiting on the Windows Vista release. Talking of the infamously delayed operating system it should be here very soon… one rumoured release to manufacturing (RTM) date of 27 October has now passed but 8 November is another date I’ve heard… so I’m about a month out with my competition entry… I should have stuck with my original instinctive answer!

On the way to work this morning, I was listening to Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott discuss Windows Vista on the Windows Weekly podcast and was amused to hear where the codename for Windows Vista (Longhorn) came from… quoting from the SuperSite for Windows Windows Longhorn FAQ:

“Remember that Windows XP was code-named Whistler and the next version of Windows, at the time, was code-named Blackcomb. Both of these names come from ski areas in British Columbia, close to Microsoft’s headquarters. At the foot of Whistler Mountain, there is a saloon named Longhorn that serves the local skiing population.”

So, the theory was that you can’t get from Whistler to Blackcomb without passing Longhorn… hence the name for the new operating system version, which was originally planned as a minor release, but soon became a major upgrade.

Windows identity crisis?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I just browsed to the Windows XP section of the Microsoft website using my Vista machine and was greeted with this:

Windows identity crisis

Nothing odd there you might think, until you look closely and see that the Microsoft website has identified my machine as running Windows NT…

Initial experiences of running Windows Vista on my everyday PC

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve written a bit about Windows Vista previously, but haven’t really used it much until recently due to a lack of decent hardware (I did have it running on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4M notebook PC with 256MB of RAM, but the RAM was a severe bottleneck).

Since converting my corporate Windows XP SP2 build to a virtual machine, I’ve been able to rebuild my work notebook to run Vista (beta 2 – build 5384) and although the processor is only marginally faster (1.8GHz Pentium 4M) it has 1GB of RAM as well as Bluetooth and an Intel Centrino chipset, making it a decent test platform for all but the Aero “glass” and other 3D effects.

I’ve also installed Office 2007 beta 2 (about which I raved after having just seen a demonstration a few weeks ago) and overall, I’m very impressed with the whole Vista and Office experience (the notes in this blog post cover about a month’s worth of usage).

Firstly, installation – I didn’t time it but it seemed faster than XP (and was certainly faster than previous releases of Windows Vista). After a few preliminary questions and copying the files from the DVD, the actual configuration only seemed to take a few minutes. Installing Office 2007 also seemed faster than my experiences with Office 2003.

Although it was very fast, I’ve had to turn off hibernation (indeed any form of advanced power management) because I found that the machine was unable to resume from a sleep/hibernate mode – but that could be because I have an unknown component in Device Manager for which I cannot find appropriate drivers – I suspect that the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7010D is not on the Vista hardware list and whilst XP drivers will work for items such as the Bluetooth card, missing core chipset functionality is bound to affect stability (I’ve also just seen Steve Lamb’s blog post on how to restore the display on Windows Vista following hibernation which might be the answer to my problem).

Although I initially dismissed it as a gimmick, I’m finding the Windows Sidebar to be very useful. I’m also getting used to the size of the desktop icons but still don’t like the black/grey taskbar and menu, the colors for which doesn’t appear to be customisable but then again I could always go back to the Windows Standard theme (or dinosaur mode).

The new search feature on the main menu (is it still called the Start menu?) is very useful (it also doubles up as the run command) and I’ve not found user access control to be as intrusive as I expected – in fact, I run as an unprivileged user and the ability to run elevated when necessary (e.g. to add a printer) is working very well.

Using the Vista machine during my recent holiday, digital photo work seemed much faster than XP (rotating 33 6-megapixel images just a few seconds). I also saw a useful feature whereby hovering the mouse over a picture in gallery produced a larger thumbnail but I can’t find that option now. On the flip side, I’ve experienced a few Windows Explorer crashes whilst copying pictures from compact flash to disk – something which shouldn’t really be a problem.

Stacking content (e.g. photos by date taken) also seems a little hit and miss although this relies on having indexed the content and as I’ve only had the laptop on for a few minutes at a time over the last couple of weeks it might not have completed yet.

Some others have questioned the reliability of this Windows Vista build but I have to say its working pretty well for me – not quite production-ready yet, but it is still a beta. In any case, Microsoft has released another build (5456) to testers, although they do note that “while we believe this build to be generally better than beta 2, it is an interim build and has not been through a rigorous test pass”.

Finally, Windows Vista beta 2 goes public

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

The betas are ready! Windows Vista

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the confusion caused by Bill Gates’ announcement of Vista beta 2 availability (the fact that I could download it from a Microsoft site but that other Microsoft channels were saying it was not yet available). Over the following days it because clear that although registered beta testers could get hold of beta 2, it had not yet been released to the public. That all changed this week – the beta is now available for download or order via the Windows Vista Customer Preview Programme – but if you’re going to try it, beware.

I’m running Windows Vista beta 2 on my main notebook PC with no significant issues but others are reporting that beta 2 is not as stable as it should be. The key point to note is that unlike products from some vendors (e.g. Google, who seem to leave products in a perpetual beta cycle – Google Mail for example!) in Microsoft “beta” really does mean pre-release software – not the final product, so don’t use it on your main PC unless you know that your data is safe should Vista implode on you.

Microsoft beta madness

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Talk about confusing… the long overdue Windows Vista beta 2 (not a community technology preview but a real beta release) has widely been expected to ship this week and yesterday, Bill Gates announced that beta 2 versions of Windows Vista, Windows Server (codenamed Longhorn) and Office 2007 are available.

The betas are ready! Office

Indeed, late last night I received an e-mail inviting me to download beta 2 of Office 2007 but strangely it said that “The Windows Vista Beta is not yet available. The Beta Experience newsletter will inform you about the availability of the Windows Vista Beta”. Vista beta 2 (build 5384) is clearly available for download from Microsoft Connect but, as usual, the product groups don’t seem to be talking to one another.

A Windows Vista-ready PC for $366

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 19 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few months back, I wrote about how you don’t really need the latest hardware to run Windows Vista and I’ve just read about Chris Sells’ $366 Windows Vista PC. To my mind, that’s proof that you don’t need an expensive new PC to run Vista.