Working and developing with Microsoft products is a great, but when it all comes down to deliver a full solution to your clients you must know how the different products from Microsoft are licensed – and this is a mess (SharePoint?). Hopefully you have some in your organization that has some knowledge of the Microsoft licensing or you have a nice licensing partner that can help you out.

But once in a while you end up with a client that wants to know how much it costs – and right now! Therefore I think it is essential if you, as a developer or architect, has (at least) some knowledge of how the different products are licensed.

To get some nice details and samples how the Microsoft licensing works I really would like to recommend these two blogs written by Emma Healey, a Microsoft Licensing Escalation Manager.

Emma Explains Microsoft Licensing in Depth This blogs contains excellent samples on how you should interpret the Microsoft licenses for various products and scenarios.  For all of you SharePoint developers this post on MOSS licensing is a must read.

InDepth Licensing Blog This blog, only available to Microsoft employees, partners and customers (Windows Live Id required) covers the same topics but not aimed for the general public(?).

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Licensing, SharePoint