Windows Licenses aren’t necessarily easy to understand. Too often I’ve seen businesses far overpay for expensive licences that they never needed to have.
In this brief article I will write about my experience with this, including saving one small organisation £15k a year by simply switching their Windows licence. I’ll give a little bit of advice on what Windows Licence you need, and I’ll end with a little plug for my work.
Windows does NOT make licencing easy. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, more so than it’s just decades of technical debt that has led to an expensive and cumbersome Windows infrastructure, and not even they know exactly what licence you need.
To illustrate how much of an awful mess it is for you to navigate, take a quick look at Windows own page on its licences for businesses: Windows Commercial LIcenses It’s a mess. You seriously need to have been in this field for many many moons to even understand the initialisms.
I’m not even sure it’s all super accurate either, or at least comes out as super vague. “Windows 11 Enterprise” is a flagship licence and advertises advanced BitLocker tools: “Allows you to eliminate on-premises tools to monitor and support BitLocker recovery scenarios.” However, I’ve never had trouble accessing and retrieving recovery codes from BitLocker on much lesser licences. That might not make much sense to most of you, and luckily, you’ll never need to know what it means. But I use it as an example to show that Windows is a frustratingly cumbersome and awkward system to have to deal with and Microsoft are doing nothing to change that.
To start, you’ve got different varieties of groups of licences. You’ve got operating system licences for computers – so this would be things like Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Basic, Windows 10 Pro, and maybe some others. This is for your actual operating system on your device. If you’re buying for a business, you have to have Windows Pro or else the functionality you need will not, well, function.
Then you’ve got commercial licences for your business users. Those will be like Windows Business Basic or E3. This is where you can really get screwed around. E3 costs around £32 per user per month, and Windows Business Premium costs around £16. You can spend less on the Basic version, but this is where a lot of functionality and features begin to get removed, such as losing access to Microsoft Teams.
This is a lot of jargon already, and sadly it’s not easy to write about this stuff without using it. There’s not even a way to put it that simply because of how diverse the requirements are of different businesses. It’s all complicated and annoying and I wish it were easier.
Speaking of my most recent experience with this, I surveyed a local organisations’ Windows licences and I was sad to see that they had been paying for E3 licences when they really only needed Windows Business Premium. So, I got their IT provider to change this.
For about 80 staff, this utterly unnoticeable adjustment saved their business over £15k per year, going from spending about £30k to £15k. It felt good; at a time where taxes were increasing, the value of money was decreasing, and nobody was spending money, I was able to find some savings for this business. It meant a little less of this money was being syphoned by the Silicon Valley psychos in California, and a little more was kept in a small town in Oxfordshire.
It genuinely turns my stomach to think of all the businesses up and down the country that are probably way overpaying money to Bill Gates because they didn’t understand what their requirements were and what an appropriate licence was.
Frankly I’d love to eventually replace all business software with something far cheaper, lighter, and more efficient, but for now, we’re at the mercy of the deep and dark pit of technical debt that Microsoft is.
Plug:
I know what licences your business needs. Spoiler alert: it’s almost always Windows Business Premium. But I also have a wealth of expertise and understanding that underscores how to make those decisions. I’ve implemented and rolled out big changes to businesses with hundreds of staff.
I’m good at this, and I want to work for you. I’m interested in the work and I love what I do. Do consider sending me an email. There’s no obligations and I won’t upsell you. Send me an email today at hello@blockbrown.co.uk.