Licence management

Can you be certain that everything on your network is properly licensed and paid for? Steve Cassidy explores a tricky issue

Licence management: this is about making sure we’re using legitimate copies of Windows and Office, right? Well, that’s part of it. Unfortunately, that only covers what former US defence chief Donald Rumsfeld memorably referred to as the “known knowns”. The sticky part of licence management is getting to grips with the “unknown unknowns”. People do strange things with computers, and even on a well-managed network you can find little fan clubs keeping old applications and variant releases alive, without giving the slightest thought to licensing. Still, as long as our headline apps are activated, we don’t need to worry about those… Unfortunately, activation alone doesn’t prove anything. Software can deactivate itself for all sorts of reasons: some apps have time limits, some won’t start unless they can contact their licence server, some will…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2021

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