Microsoft has provoked outrage among smaller partners for refusing to remove a requirement for a Live.com account on OEM installations of Office 2016.
While resellers are provided product keys from distributors, the install process reportedly loops to force a Microsoft account (formerly known as Live) to be entered.
“We are trying to resell Office 2016 Home and Business retail/OEM purchased from Synnex/Dicker/Ingram and can’t activate it with the included product key. Office 2016 now needs to ‘redeem’ the included product key and turn it into another product key. To do this requires a Microsoft account,” Melbourne Information Solutions technical consultant Olaf Bulenda told CRN.
“This is untenable. We will not be selling Office 2016 in most cases and hope the disties don’t run out of Office 2013 any time soon. To install a customer’s Office 2016 we need to get their private details or create a throwaway Microsoft account every time.”
Melbourne-based small business consultant Ben Chapman backs up the claim, saying Microsoft “doesn’t care about the Australian market, especially small businesses”.
“With Office 2013, a DVD install could be activated with a key card. Job done. With 2016, there is no DVD media but there is still a key card. This, however, is not really useful as it simply attaches that office licence - bought retail or OEM, there is now no difference - to a Microsoft Live ID,” he told CRN.
Chapman, director of A Bit of IT, said that small business clients also face hurdles with the download-and-subscribe model that Microsoft is heading towards.
“You still need to download the installation. Several hundred megabytes - not really easy for a business on less than 3Mbps ADSL. I have a few clients in this situation. This is also the reason they are not able to use the subscription model that Microsoft want them to use as they would still need to download the software each time,” he said.
“I am not able to install the software for them at my office without their Microsoft ID which they don’t have. I have one client where a generic address was set up for software activation - an alias on the admin email account - to become a Microsoft ID to get around this but it is very messy and apparently ends up having issues with too many activations.”
The Microsoft Community forum shows scores of Microsoft partners and in-house IT staff expressing the same frustrations.
“That is a major headache for independent technical consultants that support small businesses, as I do,” said forum participant Brian D Hart, who first protested about the issue on the vendor’s discussion boards.
Hart said that he would not use his own Microsoft account, as the computer and software does not belong to him; he will not force his client to create a Live.com account; nor would he “pry into” his customer’s private information to get their Microsoft credentials.
[Related: review of Microsoft Office 2016 for Windows]
Melbourne Information Solutions’ Bulenda also said that once an instance of Office 2016 is tied to a particular Microsoft account it cannot be transferred to another.
“This means that you cannot resell a PC with Office 2016 unless you also give out your Microsoft Live username and password details,” he said, showing CRN a help chat with Microsoft to support the claim.
Chapman said that using a Microsoft account links the customer to the cloud, potentially exposing company information to the internet: “Multiple users using the same MS Live ID in a business - for activation reasons - end up getting joined by the cloud sharing/exposing company information, recent documents, wireless network security keys and who knows what else between everyone using the same ID.”
Microsoft forum commenter elevativerick wrote that the restriction defeats the purpose of OEM licences: “The whole point of licensing [at] the machine purchase is to cover the DEVICE not a PERSON. That's what OEM licensing is supposed to be.”
“This is a huge problem. I can't activate these machines on a one-by-one basis, no sane IT department would undertake the task of creating discrete Live accounts for each and every new machine they get,” elevativerick wrote.
CRN contacted Microsoft regarding the issue, but had not received a response at the time of writing.
On the community forums Hart’s frustrations are clear, with the problem now having cost him both time and money.
“I have now spent several hours on this, where it should have taken about 10 seconds to just enter the product key and have the product auto-activate. In fact, in this case, I lost so much time that I finally removed Office 2016 entirely, then went online last night and purchased a downloadable copy of retail Office 2013 that I could activate with a product key only. But I cannot charge my client for that software,” he said.
“Thanks to Microsoft, any profit I could have made on this computer sale has been eliminated, and I now have a Dell OEM Office 2016 product keycard sitting on my desk that cannot be installed anywhere without a MS account.”
A Bit of IT’s Chapman said that small businesses simply cannot afford to bulk buy to get around the Office 2016 issue.
“Small businesses with less than 10 people are also never going to go down the other path of volume licensing at three times the price per seat, nor are they prepared to go from $100 per month ADSL to $1000 per month wireless IP to get enough bandwidth in areas where the options are limited at 3.5-4.5km from an exchange."
The latest version of Microsoft’s popular workplace suite was released in September.
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