xsharp.eu

Hello,
it seems that Microsoft has changed the conditions of the Action Pack: they have removed the "internal use" license, so software that is part of the Action Pack can only be used for demo purposes, and only if the respective partner has the correct competence.
This is really a pity, and for sure I will not renew mine....
Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang,

Where did you see this? I renewed mine back in January and everything seemed the same at that time.

Nick

Hi Nick,

this is a recent change, I saw an article on the german IT site heise.de (in German unfortunately):
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung ... 67604.html
Another change is that you have no more free support calls, but they are to pay now.
I had tried to renew mine a few days ago, but contrarily to the past years it is not possible to renew it before the end of the period, but only after.
AFAIK your license remains until your current Action Pack is due to renew.
Wolfgang

Hi Nick,
II found that:
Change Notification: Product Licenses Terms of Use Update on July 1, 2020
As of July 2020, the terms of use for product licenses included in programs and offers in the Microsoft Partner Network such as competencies and the Microsoft Action Pack will change. Currently, the licenses allow partners to access and use the products for internal business purposes. We will retire product licenses for internal use purposes on July 1, 2020. After that date, product licenses offered through the Microsoft Partner Network may only be used for business development scenarios, including demonstration purposes, solution/services development purposes, and internal training purposes.
in this document:
https://assets.microsoft.com/en-us/MPN- ... -Guide.pdf
Wolfgang

Thanks.

That's going to take some careful reading.... for instance it seems to say that development tools can be used for creating a generic product for sale, but not for creating a custom solution. That seems pretty weird to put it mildly!

Also it says that things like Microsoft Office can NOT be used on an employees home computer, but then that sort of implies that it CAN be used on an office computer??

Nick

Hi Nick,
yes, the change of the Visual Studio license is relatively clear - in fact it cannot be used anymore for development if not for inhouse development. I'm expecting that the Community license will also be changed so we cannot use it anymore but will need to acquire a license for it.
Regarding the Microsoft Office license: this says it can be used only for internal use, but only for demonstration, development and internal training. So in future we will need to buy again the Office licenses...
Wolfgang

That situation changed some time ago.. maybe they just caught up with you. I pay the MSDN Visual Studio ? what ever and $4400 per annum license renewed last week and I use all the server, systems etc myself.. not sold to anybody. Yes you could say testing like 2019 server have 5 running for own use in datacenter. See no conflicts with license. But was on action pack for years and about 4 years told could not use for production. I think you find the real reason they are killing off the shrink wrap sale market. This new roll out WINDOWS 10 (multi) in Azure for Office 365 users looks good for say Desktop/ back office systems. Terminal server users to a cheap server.

Hi Phil,
the reason behind this all is relatively simple, I think.
All these US corporations need money, to keep their stock values.
The income should be as high as possible, and the expenses as low as possible, and they don't ask for the value of their products for the customer anymore.
Look at Adobe or Autodesk: they have only very expensive subscriptions anymore, and Microsoft tries to do the same.
I have a customer that runs an Oracle database on a Linux server for years now, and pays maintenance every year without any value for anyone than Oracle itself. But every 3 years Oracle engages another company to make a license compliance check to see if they could ask more money.... even when there would be a disaster recovery strategy with a secondary offline (switched off) server they would ask for payment.
Wolfgang

You mention these US corporates need money..
What about Google and MAPS API key.. out of the blue a $600 a month bill for maps.
We turned off maps and forced clients to give us their CC and setup an API key per larger user.
They changed if form like 60000 calls to 25,000 calls..massive reduction.
Then our bill continued to be high and put diagnostics where are these calls.
The Google crawling website creates the map calls. Then we have to modify all the websites not to something if it is a bot. These companies are going to come from every angle to trap you into paying.
See Office 365 client have 6 staff pay the license and staff turn over paying for 10. Delete 4 and 30 days later all data deleted and cannot be restored... contracts, legal documents gone etc. See Altaro and others offering Office 365 offsite backups.. if you delete things in Office 365 and date exceeded, data gone. So this is a cost on top of cost you thought you were paying for say 1Tb of data. We build lots of websites and retired our servers and so unhappy with some of the costs to get decent CPU we have been reintroducing our own hardware servers again for bang for buck, Once these companies have your data they just jack up the prices.

Well, Phil,
we heard you tell us "Cloud, cloud, cloud" for years. Always had my doubts, as this means, "trapped, trapped, trapped"
<s,cr>

Karl