1

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing question?

We purchased 15 machines, all the same model, OS and configuration. Each one has an OEM version of Office Basic 2007. Is the OEM licensing going to have an issue with us rolling out an image? I have never done this before and don't know if we can use a third party tool to change the license key manually or what?

0

1 Answer 1

3

Yeah it's going to be a bit of a problem. What you're "supposed" to do is buy Office via Microsoft's Volume Licensing plan, in which case you get a single product key that will work for multiple installs and bypasses activation. The same is true for Windows itself.

That said, you can try something like this: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/01/12/how-to-reset-or-change-microsoft-office-2007-product-license-key-or-volume-license-key-vlk/

Personally I haven't had good luck messing with product keys recently, especially with OEM versions of Microsoft software.

I buy machines in small quantities as needed, so I don't typically do volume licensing for Windows (although I do use it for Office). What I do is maintain a large archive of restore disks. It's a pain, but not a big enough pain to put much time into. Another option is store images of each machine when it's setup and ready to go. This will cost in disk space and time (since you probably won't maintain all of the images), but it will save time over having to do the restore/reinstall from source media.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .