A number of years ago as a student I worked for a University's IT
department. The school had just built a school wide network and
decided to upgrade all of the professor's Macs. The school bought
all new Macs which came bundeled with MacOS and Microsoft Office.
I was on the 'installation team' and we installed the machines in
each of the offices over the summer. The license for the sofware
was inside each computer box, and when we were done setting up the
computers we left the licenses and manuals in each professor's office.
Maybe things were different then and no IT department would even
consider leaving the licenses with each computer now, but what would
have happen if, say, a year later the university was audited by the
BSA for Microsoft Office licenses. I could say with absolute
certainty that every computer in every office on campus was
properly licensed for the base software (obviously no one could
comment on software that might have been added by any individual
professor), but could the University have actually proven that
they actually had a legal license for the software on the machines?
Is a purchase slip for X hundred computers good enough to cover your
software license for each of those machines? If not, how many
man-hours would it take to get the license for each office (assuming
that each person had bothered to keep the license and didn't throw
it in the trash or lose it).
What about the machines where an end-user decided that they needed
to have Microsoft Access (or something like that) installed? How
do you even police that? I'm not aware of a good/unobtrusive
software license monitoring package that is widely used (we used
one in the computer lab itself, but didn't even comtemplate a
school wide software package).
Unless you have a site license for every common piece of software
that you run is it even possible to be 100% sure you are licensed
for every software package running on your machines?
