Software Assurance is Microsoft's term for their software maintenance program. Software Assurance can be purchased with a new licence bought through their licensing program.

Once purchased, Software Assurance lasts the whole of the Agreement term and can be re-purchased at the end of the term to continue to receive the benefits for a further period.

Dependant on the level of licences you purchase, the benefits are great. Listed below are some of the benefits gained by purchasing Software Assurance with your licences.

All products available with Software Assurance qualify for New Version rights on all the licensing schemes. This means you get access to the new Microsoft software versions as they are released for the products you own Software Assurance on reducing the cost of buying new licences and allowing you to take immediate advantage of the latest technology.

The Home Use Program is valid for any licenced product in the Microsoft Office range (Microsoft Office, Access, Excel, OneNote™, FrontPage®, InfoPath™, Publisher, Visio®, Word, PowerPoint® and Project Standard Edition). Your employees can get a copy to install at home for business and personal use giving the the flexibility to work on the same version of office at home as they do at work. Please Note: This is not available to the Open Academic/Charity Software Assurance customers.

There are some provisions with this scheme.

If the customer ceases to have Software Assurance or the employee ceases to be an employee then the user must stop using the software at home, uninstall it and destroy any software associated with it.

The number of Home rights users must not exceed the number of licences purchased with Software Assurance and the home user must be an work user of that product installing it only once at home (i.e. single licence rights for home users)

Customers must provide information on the Home users to prove eligibility, only notifying eligible users that they qualify for the benefit.

Employees will order the software from a Microsoft hosted website and pay a fullfilment fee for the software, support, shipping and handling.

All customers with Software Assurance for Microsoft server software, as well as related Client Access Licences (CALs), qualify for complimentary 'cold back-up' server licences for disaster recovery. (Note: a 'cold server' is one reserved exclusively for disaster recovery.) Certain conditions apply:

  1. The back-up server on which the software is run must be turned off, except for:
    • Limited periodical testing of disaster recovery procedures and patch management on the software; or
    • In the case of an actual disaster. The disaster recovery copies of the software cannot be installed on a server in the same cluster as the production server.
  2. In the case of an actual disaster, the software may not be run simultaneously on both the disaster recovery back-up server and the production server, except while the production server is being recovered. When the production server is back online, use of the software under the disaster recovery licences is again subject to the conditions described here.
  3. Complimentary disaster recovery licences are non-perpetual. They expire when the Software Assurance for the corresponding qualifying licence or related CALs expires or is terminated. If Software Assurance is discontinued, any copy of the software installed on the cold back-up server under a complimentary disaster recovery licence must be uninstalled.
  4. The version, edition, and type of the complimentary disaster recovery licence and the underlying licence for the qualifying server software must be identical. For example, if the underlying licence for the qualifying server software is a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard processor licence, then the complimentary disaster recovery licence must be a SQL Server 2000 Standard processor licence.

For every Windows desktop licence covered by Software Assurance (SA), customers are entitled to one Windows Vista upgrade licence on all schemes of licensing.

Organisations purchasing Software Assurance through the higher levels of licensing options such as Select and Enterprise gain even more benefits not listed here.