When it comes to licensing, most of the time we discuss what you cannot do with the licenses. Today I thought I would touch on what you CAN do with Microsoft licenses as it pertains to the SPLA program. I came up with a list of ideas that you can take advantage of being a Microsoft hosting partner.
- Use SPLA licenses internally. There is a 50% rule with SPLA that states you can use 50% of what you are hosting for your internal employees. Let’s say you are hosting 10 Exchange licenses externally, the terms of the agreement states you can use up to 5 licenses internally. These licenses are not free, you would still need to report those 5 licenses on your monthly report (report a total of 15 licenses to your reseller). One way of reducing your volume licensing count.
- 60 Day Evaluation – This allows a service provider to host an application as a trial for up to 60 days per customer! Trick is you cannot receive a fee during this period.
- Customer Owned Licenses – Customers can bring their own licenses into your data center and you can host the software for them. The issue: you must host it in a physical dedicated environment (nothing shared amongst other customers).
- Install Servers on Customers Premise – As long as you own the hardware, you can locate the server at your customers location.
- Receive the latest version. As new technology is released, you will have access. (check SPUR for availability)
- Partner with another service providers to host the software. This is especially important for customers looking to deploy a Dynamics solution but are not Dynamics authorized.
It’s refreshing to write about what you can do. Microsoft is not always the bad guy!
Thanks for reading!
SPLA Man
SPLA Licensing 
John Zanni
August 11, 2013 at 11:50 am
Microsoft is still one of the most hosting friendly companies.
splaman
August 11, 2013 at 12:17 pm
That’s true. Thanks for your comments!
Josh Maddern
October 13, 2013 at 7:20 pm
The 60 day eval is great to know, thanks! With Customer Owned licences, when you say (nothing shared amongst other customers), does this include network and storage, or are you only referring to the compute, i.e. the physical servers providing the hypervisor?
splaman
October 14, 2013 at 9:39 am
Difficult question to answer since the definition is not located in the SPUR. I think it’s a miss but do understand that all scenarios cannot be in a singe document. Be careful with customer owned licenses. During an audit if it’s not written in the SPUR, doesn’t mean you can do it either. Here’s my opinion, if you have customer owned licenses, use license mobility and complete the verification form to cover yourself. Three things that come up regularly in an audit 1) customer owned licenses and using license mobility without qualifying for license mobility, 2) not reporting all users with RDS, and 3) Not reporting enough Windows licenses.
Robert Biggs
November 29, 2013 at 11:20 am
According to the SPLA material at Microsoft Virtual Academy, when hosting client software you have to have dedicated servers and storage, the network can be shared. Although, I am never certain that the information I find on MVA is actually correct!
airuzzo
February 27, 2018 at 3:13 pm
According to:
60 Day Evaluation – This allows a service provider to host an application as a trial for up to 60 days per customer! Trick is you cannot receive a fee during this period.
How it works for trial software? were i find a list of ? are, on vlsc portal, marked as trial or somenthing ?
Thanks for help
MS Licensing
February 28, 2018 at 10:51 am
Sure. I don’t think you should install trial software at all. I think you should install using regular SPLA software since you do not have to pay for users who are going through the 60 day evaluation period. Trial software will expire and you will have to reinstall using regular SPLA media through the VLSC.
Björn Dobson
March 5, 2021 at 4:27 am
Hi, is this still accurate?
In what Microsoft document can i read about this terms?