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It seemed to be the case in the past you could use Office on a single device for general business purposes (as well as, I believe, use copies on development machines provided the user had an MSDN subscription)
However, the latest guidance seems to be that Office can now only be used on a single device for 'production use', not general business use. So if you want Office 2010 for business email correspondence then you need to buy a separate copy?
Am I reading this correctly?
Edit: here is the MS guidance:
Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Premium with MSDN subscriptions include Microsoft Office applications for development and testing. Additionally, the following applications can be used by licensed users of Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN and Visual Studio Premium with MSDN on one device for production use:
- Office Professional Plus 2010
- Visio® Premium 2010
- Project Professional 2010 (includes one device CAL for Project Server)
However, production environment is defined as:
A production environment is defined as an environment that is accessed by end-users of an application (such as an Internet Web site) and that is used for purposes other than Acceptance Testing of that application.
I would intrepret general business use to be within this definition?
you are correct; the wording in the MS Guidance is meant to differentiate 'production' use (Office products, for whatever you normally use Office for in your business) from 'development' use (everything else, for developing solutions only), which I think MS believes is a clearer distinction than "general use". – KutuluMike – 2012-05-30T20:16:35.157