Software Licensing with License Manager

DO YOU KNOW how many servers and applications your IS organization supports? Do you have accurate records of paid client licenses, and do you monitor client access to your software? You need to be aware that software copyright violations carry a maximum civil penalty of $100,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $250,000. Any user who makes, acquires, or uses unauthorized copies of software can incur these penalties. A user's cavalier attitude toward sharing software can result in serious legal consequences for your enterprise.

The best way to protect your organization is to keep employees informed of the liabilities associated with illegal or unlicensed copies of software. You need to create and distribute a corporate software policy that contains employee guidelines for using software inhouse and on the Internet. The Software Publishers Association provides a sample software usage policy template on its Anti-Piracy Web site at http://www.spa.org/piracy/empguide.htm.

License Manager
In addition to educating employees, you must track and monitor software access across your enterprise. License Manager is a native Windows NT Server tool that helps you monitor server and client licenses for NT, Microsoft BackOffice products, and other license-aware applications. To start License Manager, select Programs, Administrative Tools, License Manager from the Start menu. You can view license information four ways: by purchase history, by product, by client, or by server. Screen 1 shows License Manager's server view. Within each License Manager tab, double-click or right-click an entry to see detailed licensing information.

Licensing Modes
When you install license-aware software, you must select one of two client-licensing modes: per-server or per-seat. (For help deciding which licensing mode to choose, see Glenn Grant, Scott Weppler, and Microsoft's Enterprise Systems Support Domain Specialty Team, "Domain Troubleshooting and Planning," August 1996.) When you install NT or Microsoft Exchange Server, you must specify per-server or per-seat licensing for each product. Regardless of which licensing mode you select, you must enter license information in License Manager's purchase history section each time you purchase a new product or additional licenses.

License Manager uses the purchase history to track legal and illegal client usage in both licensing modes. When the number of client connections License Manager records exceeds the number in the purchase history, License Manager notes the unlicensed access in its Clients section and in the Application event log.

Per-server licensing. When you select the per-server mode, you establish the maximum number of clients that can simultaneously connect to one server running a product or application (e.g., NT, Exchange Server). Per-server connections are on a first-come, first-served basis. As a safeguard, administrators can always connect to a server, even when the server reaches the maximum number of licensed client connections.

The per-server mode is a holdover from when servers hosted file and print services. This mode is most appropriate when one server hosts an application that a subset of users requires (e.g., a department-specific application). When you have enough licenses, users connect to servers on demand. If user demand exceeds the number of licenses, NT and license-aware applications can refuse new connections. When a product denies a connection, the product typically writes an error message to the Application log, stating that you've reached the maximum number of connections.

You check unlicensed client access on the Clients tab of License Manager. When the demand exceeds the maximum number of concurrent connections, you can purchase additional server licenses or switch to per-seat mode. You can switch between licensing modes only once. To see which licensing mode a server is running, use the Licensing applet in Control Panel.

Per-seat licensing. The per-seat mode is more common than the per-server mode. When you choose the per-seat option, you must purchase one server license for each NT or BackOffice product and one client license for every computer that connects to the application or server. The per-seat option lets all the network computers access all the servers, and the number of concurrent users on a server is irrelevant. Because the license is machine-specific, anyone who uses the computer can access the network.

You can purchase NT with as many per-seat licenses as you need. When you add other BackOffice products to your enterprise, you need a per-seat client license for each product your users will access. For example, when you install Exchange Server, every system that accesses email must have an NT per-seat license and an Exchange Server per-seat license. At approximately $35 per license, this cost is $70 per client. When your users require access to three or more BackOffice products, purchasing an all-inclusive BackOffice client license is more cost-effective than purchasing client licenses for each application.