December 16th, 2008 by Matt Fisher
The BSA has announced agreements totalling £140,000 with two Scottish companies accused of using unlicensed software. One company, a phone repair business, was fined a massive £120,000 in addition to the cost of legalising the software used on its network. The firm was found to have illegal copies of Office, Project, Visio SQL as well as other applications on approximately 100 computers
Separately, a motor dealer group was fined nearly £25,000 for using unlicensed copies of applications from Microsoft, Symantec and Adobe.
Posted in License Compliance, BSA |
December 16th, 2008 by Martin Callinan
As of December 9, 2008, the VLSC licensing dashboard includes a notification area for site alerts, a Volume Licensing news and announcements section and links to key tasks.
Accessing VLSC
Designed for midsize and enterprise businesses that accessed their Microsoft License Statements through Microsoft Volume License Services (MVLS) and Microsoft eOpen websites, VLSC provides a simpler interface and more robust features to help reduce time spent on licensing-related administrative tasks.
VLSC offers key benefits for licensed software management: Licensing information, composed of the Licensing Summary and the Relationship Summary.
Licensing Summary
You can use VLSC to view current and past Microsoft License Statements across programs and agreements—all in simple format.
Volume License Relationship Summary
VLSC includes a report that shows all Volume Licensing agreements associated to a user’s profile.
Downloads
Accelerated download speeds and a simple, secure user interface make it easy and safe for you to use VLSC to find the right product, based on your licensing entitlements.
Product Keys
VLSC makes it easy for you to request product keys for the Windows Vista operating system, enables retrieval of volume license keys for all Microsoft licensed products, and provides access to technical support.
Posted in Microsoft, License Manager, License Compliance, Licensing, License Agreements, Software Licence Management |
December 11th, 2008 by Matt Fisher
Software anti-piracy organization, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has agreed settlements worth £35,000 with three UK companies accused of using unlicensed software.
The BSA acted on behalf of Symantec, Autodesk and Microsoft. The three firms were active the recycling services, design and manufacturing and property management sectors.
While software piracy might be considered by many to only affect larger organizations, in one of the three cases the BSA took action over unlicensed software on just 20 PCs, proving that accurate license management and compliance is a must for companies of all sizes.
Posted in License Compliance, BSA |
November 25th, 2008 by Matt Fisher
Gartner has identified Software Asset Management (SAM) as critical to helping IT organizations survive the current economic troubles. Alongside VOIP, virtualization, security managed services and data center hosting, the analyst firm highlighed SAM as critical to getting IT leaders to think more like CFOs, looking to address areas of inefficiency as well as investing in new technologies to drive savings.
It certainly seems that SAM fits the bill: aiding organizations to realize savings through better use of existing assets, preventing uneccessary spending on duplicate software, reducing the cost of support and maintenance agreements and avoiding the risk of costly compliance fines.
But to be truly effective, SAM requires IT and finance teams to collaborate closely. And this will be the subject of a more ind-depth post shortly.
Posted in Software Asset Management, Analysts |
