Windows Desktop Licensing Can Be As Perilous As Any Other Microsoft Product

In any software audit, there are two over-arching categories of information that must be collected: data regarding what products are deployed on a business' computers and records demonstrating the licenses that the business has acquired to use those products. With regard to the entitlements, some kinds of licenses often are relatively easy to document. For example, in Microsoft audits, entitlement records for server applications like SQL Server or Exchange Server often do not require significant effort to locate, simply because they either were expensive (and, thus, were saved in the ordinary course of business with records regarding other significant purchases) or were acquired through one of Microsoft's volume licensing channels, resulting in purchase records being available either from Microsoft or from the business' reseller. However, other kinds of license records may be less easy to locate, resulting in a potential source of audit exposure when deployments