Microsoft News Bites

	Web Services Developers Kit Preview
	Corporate Licenses Don’t Cover OS For Naked PC’s

Web Services Developers Kit Preview

Microsoft has placed its Web Services Developers Kit (WSDK) into Technical Preview.  WSDK is available for free download on the MSDN developer program Web site. 

It permits developers who are using Visual Studio.NET and the .NET framework to implement Web Services Specifications, including WS-Security (X509 certificates, digital signatures, XML encryption, and custom binary security tokens), WS-Routing, and DIME and WS-Attachments

WSDK will enable developers to add security and other advanced Web Services capabilities to their applications with minimal effort.

The WSDK requires a Windows 200 or XP Pro operating system running on a minimum of a Pentium 233 MHz processor (300 recommended) with a minimum of 64Mb of RAM (128Mb or higher recommended).  It also requires Microsoft IIS, 5.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework SDK Version 1.0 with Service Pack 2 or later.

You can get more information at http://msdn.microsoft.com/webservices/building/wsdk/

Corporate Licenses Don’t Cover OS For Naked PC’s

We’ve discovered something we didn’t know, although we’re not sure that Microsoft corporate licensees find it any big surprise, but having checked it out, we’ll pass it along.

If you buy your Microsoft operating system licenses as part of a corporate licensing program, you may indeed choose which version of the Microsoft OS to place on your desktops, but what you’re purchasing are upgrades, not the underlying licenses. 

That means you must buy hardware preloaded with Windows operating systems by your OEM (most are).  Recently, some inexpensive hardware has shown up “naked,” that is, without an operating system loaded (or with a free Linux license).  If a corporate licensee should buy these naked machines he would need to purchase Microsoft OS licenses at retail to load onto the machines before exercising the upgrade rights in his volume license. 

You can read about the terms of Microsoft’s volume licenses here http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/.

And, by the way, we don’t think this is new.  We think that it was a non-issue as long as every PC was going out with a copy of Windows anyway and it became an issue when naked PC’s started cropping up.  This comes under the heading of “know what it says on the documents you’ve signed.”

  

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