So my advice here is to look at the licensing right at the beginning of any Windows 7 deployment project.Ĭhallenge #3 – Do we need new servers for this? And even if they then make it to the portal, in the worst case they have to find out that their current license agreement doesn’t cover Windows 7 yet, and since often new license agreements aren’t negotiated over night this can cause further delays in deployment projects. Many companies have downloaded their enterprise media and license keys for Windows Server 2003 and XP long time ago, getting the Windows 7 installation sources and volume license keys can cause a challenge as often it’s unclear who has the access rights to the Microsoft volume Licensing Center. The next challenge is often to obtain the volume license keys to activate KMS. Volume Activation for Windows and Office 2010 The tech guy will get to the technical documentation later anyway. Now sending a whole bunch of technical references won’t help at this stage, what people need is a short presentation or video. So the first thing that needs to happen is to create the awareness on the topic and ensure they understand what KMS is all about. If they haven’t read about it yet and didn’t talk to their Microsoft TAM for a while, the term KMS doesn’t ring a bell for them.

In today’s blog post I want to talk about some of the experiences I’ve made, provide some considerations you should take and provide some useful tips and references that will hopefully help making your KMS deployment as smooth as possible.īy now you would expect that anyone who’s dealing with Microsoft technology should be familiar with the term KMS right? Well if you’re a Windows engineer or consultant who’s busy with deployments this is probably an obvious thing, but hey let’s not forget our server admin who’s been busy keeping his Windows 2003 based infrastructure alive, so that the desktop guy could deploy his Windows XP boxes or the CTO who last poked within the Windows registry on a Windows NT 4.0 box. Yes despite the fact that in theory this is nothing more than just a service you install on one or two servers in your datacenter and publish an SRV resource record in DNS, this is something that keeps people busy in nearly any project I’ve been involved so far. If today someone asks me what I consider as being one of the top 10 challenges I’ve seen in Windows 7 deployment projects I must mention KMS. I’ve been involved in Windows 7 deployments since the Beta came out in 2009 and before Windows 7 there was Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT and even Windows 3.11 and although over time the technology has changed the basic challenges of every migration remained the same.

Kms for windows 7