Its Microsoft audit time

Dr Zoidberg

Dr Zoidberg

Dr Zoidberg

Associate
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
710
Location
Somerset
Hi

I am 4 days into my first IT role and loving every minute so far, but one of my first tasks has been to sort out our software as Microsoft want to audit some time soon.

My question is what will they want or expect?

I am organising all our discs and licenses and then plan to check what is installed every where (am looking at using Spiceworks) and then compare the 2 to make sure everything is licensed

Spiceworks can generate a report that i can put next to our license list, but what exactly are microsoft going to want to see at the end of the day?

I have done a little searching but not really found the answer i am looking for.

Thanks
Keith
 
Only been involved in the one audit from MS and it didn't run how I expected it to. It was closer to a health check than an investigation.

Two staff turned up and collected the license information from us (paper licenses, license agreement numbers, company trading names, software resellers we've used) and the results from our software audit.

At the time the company hadn't deployed any auditing software and Microsoft has very little in the way of software auditing tools or monitoring in desktop or server applications. They do have http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/msia.mspx but it is very limited. We provided Microsoft with our best guess and they accept it without query or without any attempts to collect there own data.

They collated all this information and came back to us telling us we weren't under licensed but they had found some of our licenses were fake and asked for assistance in tracing where we had got them from.

The company was in a Select agreement with Software Assurance so even if they had found any licence short fall as long as it was filled within the period of time the SA agreement was valid we wouldn't have been in breach of anything.
 
Thanks Gord

Not sounding as bad as i thought it would,

So as long as our paper work matches or betters the numbers our audit shows up all should be good :)

Thanks
 
We've just gone though a SAM exercise at work, weirdly I really enjoyed it all so am looking to do more down that route with the ISEB certifications.

Part of the project was to get certified as compliant by MS which involved us getting all our license info (which was all volume licensed, no box produts which made it easier) and then producing something that showed how many installs of said products we had.

We used a mixture of SMS and products called License Manager and Discovery from Centennial software.

Should be getting our certificate of compliance from MS through in a week or 2 after I've been up to MS at reading for my SAM training.
 
Im certified in microsoft licensing w00t?! .... anyway lol.

What agreements do you use at work? Licensing i.e no actual box or oem slip?

Or retail or OEM. What size company are you? If you use OEM make sure there aren;t any dodgy copies around or on any server, make sure each server (if using OEM) has a COA attached to it that no other server is using for its key.

Retail boxed wise make sure you can allocate a license to each pc/server.

Licensing wise ask your re-seller to do you a "Consumption Report" this is a report of all licensing (not OEM or retail) that microsoft have you down for. Then talley that up against what you actually have installed for.

Although they aren't strict as such, if found to be dodgy or they DO WANT TO BE STRICT, they can really **** you over lol.

Phil
 
I had a day at MS today on a SAM course, just went over what we'd already done (I think most people were there to look at how to 'do' SAM in there organisation from scratch).

The chap was telling us how MS pick what companies to audit :)
 
bitslice said:
how do they pick them then ? :confused:

do they trawl forums looking for Microsoft bashers, and then audit their company into the dirt :p
Click to expand...

I would if I did that job :)

No doubt they do it loads of other ways as well, but the chap was telling us they buy company info from that dean and something place (I can't remember what it's called :( ), then with employee numbers for companies they cross reference it with their records for licenses.

So if your company has say 1000 employees but you only have 100 exchange cals on record they might think somethings up. He also said there were 2 thresholds, one where they'll ask you to do the audit and report back to them and another where they will send someone round.

Obviously that's a very crude example and I'm sure the process is a lot more in depth than that :)
 
Ev0 said:
No doubt they do it loads of other ways as well, but the chap was telling us they buy company info from that dean and something place (I can't remember what it's called :( ), then with employee numbers for companies they cross reference it with their records for licenses.
Click to expand...

It's Dun & Bradstreet.
 
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