Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

The main advantage of being a Microsoft Partner in the eyes of a technician are free software licenses – and many of them.

In general, you get three types of licenses:

License types

Internal Use Licenses

This is the best you get. These are full fledged internal use licenses which you can use for anything inside your company. There are no restrictions on use, except that you can’t sell them, or use them at a different company. You will get volume Licenses for all relevant Microsoft products – the only thing that i didn’t like was that you don’t get Vista Enterprise with KMS, just Vista Business with a MAK Key.

You can gain additional internal use licenses by gaining competencies, or by advancing to Gold Partner.

Demonstration Licenses

You can’t use them in production, but on learning systems or demo systems for customers. They do use the same keys as the Internal Use Licenses, though.

MSDN/Technet Licenses

These are only for non-production and development. You may not use them on any productive system, even if that system is for development too. i.E. you can’t install a MSDN Office on a developers PC, when he uses Word to write documentation or Outlook to read company mails. Silly rules IMO, but you’ll have to play by them.

License List

See this link:

Software Licensing for Certified and Gold Certified Partners

You’ll see that you usually get the Enterprise or best version of each product, with the exception of Windows Vista. Usually 25 CAL/User Programs, and one or two servers for certified partners, and 100 CAL/User Programs and more servers for gold certified partners.