Hi all, not wanting to dip into an area of dubious legality too much, as if its definately off the cards then obviously I will buy the full products, but does anyone know the current stance that microsoft has for home evaluation of their products using technet? What I mean by this is rather than me buying as a sole trader for my business, that I buy as a normal consumer with the intent of installing on my spare machine windows 7/8 office 2010/2013 and a couple fo other program suites available to use at home to boost my familiarity with said software, rather than buying and using the same software through technet for my business, as this would be a needless drain on resources and I am very very small at the moment. Just to put in perspective, I have win 7 hp on my desktop rig, and office 2010, both full retail so dont need to make a sneaky install. But for familiarity with win 8 and office 2013, (and to some extent win 7 with 2013 and win 8 with 2010) to give me the knowledge after getting a call/referral about a problem or issue, I at least have a testing environment to try to replicate it. I can find fairly definative answers dating back from 2009 saying such use is ok, as it is not production/internal use (my win 7 desktop takes care of that, and company work is carried out on this rig anyway), but the license terms seem to have changed, and I dont seem to be able to find comparatve clauses allowing me to purchase this for home testing, other than ambiguous phrases about using on any of my devices (inc home devices) insinuating that I have to purchase through my business. And just to make things clear, I really dont make much money through the business at the moment as the 3 clients I do have regularly I provide a free service due to either the fact they are a local charity in one case, or the fact that they have helped me in the past with certain legal problems so troubleshooting/pc maintainence is the least I can do, hence why this is required to be a personal purchase (and its the professional subscription I'm looking at), and am using a little word of mouth to throw jobs my way around my usual day job too. If I can't I dont mind buying office 2013 and win 8 full retail as I will be buying them in a few months to put on a new build, but would rather ***** the money on a technet sub and get the other benefits (such as the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of server 2012) included before I build the new system and buy the proper licenses anyway (5 yrs pirate free on a personal note since the sale of an old chipped xbox and fairly proud tbh)
The rule with TechNet Subscriptions is all software is given for testing use only, it cannot be used in production, so I hope this answers your question (I did read half of it but its early morning)
You can use technet to evaluate a product and learn it. You're not meant to buy it then use it for installing on all the PC's at home if you've bought it for your company. You'll be fine with what you want to do.
brilliant, Like I said, the forum posts relating to this are for 2009 that I can find, and the license wording has changed, so seems a little more ambiguous to me for this kind of use case. Also the lines relating to indefinate evaluation have been removed and replaced with a definitive statement requireing removal of software at the end of the subscription (though this isnt an issue as I will use and renew the subscription as needed and purchase the correct licenses for my self)
