The most common type of licence sold to small businesses is called the Open licence, an entry level licence offered to businesses with a minimum of just 2 PC's who need a minimum of 5 licences. An example of a typical purchase is someone with 2 PC's wanting to upgrade both machines with XP Professional, adding Office 2003 and then adding Project 2003 to the portfolio.

Whether you have just 2 PC's or 250 PC's Microsoft Open Licence is a flexible licence for small to medium-sized organisations that would like to buy Microsoft software licences outright.

On purchasing an Open licence, the product purchased is yours for life (perpetual) with the whole payment being made on purchase.

With the initial order made, you enter into an Open Licence agreement which lasts two years. All this means is that you are entitled to purchase additional licences under this agreement at the Open Licence discounted price. Once this term expires you would have to, in effect, start again with a new agreement to gain discounts, it does not mean you have to re-purchase the licences you purchased originally.

Buying Open licences over Fully Packaged Products helps you:

Charities and Educational establishments gain greater benefits by even further reduced pricing.

The more licences you buy, the more discount you can receive. Plus once you have made your initial purchase of 5 licences you can buy further licences under the same agreement code in any quantity from a single licence to hundreds and have the benefit from the same discounts as the initial order.

Your licence details and activation keys or codes are safely stored and available on Microsoft's secure website should you ever need access to them saving you the worry of having to find them.

Software Assurance (explained in detail on another page) is not included by default but can be purchased with an Open licence.

The Open licence plan also has 2 sub - plans, Open Business and Open Volume, once you have the basics of the Open licence plan these sub plans are easily explained.

Open Business offers the most basic level of discount, calculated purely on the amount of licences purchased. Only 5 licences need to be initially bought to qualify for the scheme. Most small businesses need not read any further.

Open Volume is the part where everyone doesn't understand and switches off but is quite simple when you look at the table below. It is done on a "point and pools" system, needing the purchaser to buy a minimum of 500 points from a single pool. There are only three pools (software product categories) and they are:

Microsoft assigns each product a point value based on its price range. Each licence purchased from a pool will get the appropriate points. The more points purchased in each pool, the bigger the discounts.

An Example of the Points and pools system.

Applications Pool
Points
Products Purchased
Qualifying Points
Office Professional
2
x 180
360
Excel 2003
1
x 50
50
Project 2003
1
x 120
120
Totals
350
530

 

The above client only needed to purchase 350 licences to qualify for the discounts available from the Open Volume scheme as he exceeded the initial minimum 500 qualifying points by 30. The client will now receive discounts on any amount of further licences purchased from the Applications pool over the next 2 years.

Systems Pool
Points
Products Purchased
Qualifying Points
Windows XP Professional Upgrade
2
x 250
500
Totals
250
500

 

This client only needed to purchase 250 licences to qualify for the discounts available from the Open Volume scheme as he matched the initial minimum 500 qualifying points. The client will now receive discounts on any amount of further licences purchased from the Systems pool over the next 2 years.

Servers Pool
Points
Products Purchased
Qualifying Points
Windows Server 2003 Standard
15
x 4
60
Windows Server 2003 Client Access Licence
1
x 450
450
Totals
454
510

 

This client needed to purchase 454 licences to qualify for the discounts available from the Open Volume scheme as he exceeded the initial minimum 500 qualifying points by 10. The client will now receive discounts on any amount of further licences purchased from the Servers pool over the next 2 years.

Each pool is its own separate entity, in other words, to qualify for discounts in all 3 pools you will need to purchase a minimum of 500 points from all 3 pools, to qualify for a discount in the servers pool you just need to meet the 500 points needed for servers.

The staff at NCI understand that Microsoft licensing is complex, we have qualified staff who regularly take training and complete the Microsoft qualifications to better understand all aspects of Microsoft licensing. If you are unsure of the type of licences you need feel free to call us so we can evaluate your needs.