What is Software Assurance?
Microsoft Software Assurance is a maintenance offer that helps your organization get the most from Microsoft software through a broad range of benefits. From deployment planning and staff training to product support and software upgrades, Software Assurance benefits help you increase worker productivity, accelerate organizational performance, and realize a return on your software investment faster.
Software Assurance is an annual subscription plan to help our customers keep current with new product releases. It also provides with auto-updates for all new rules that we publish while your subscription is active. When we release a new version of our products, customers with a current maintenance subscription can receive the upgrade at no additional charge. Customers without maintenance can purchase the new release by paying an upgrade fee which is still considerably lower than the full price. Software Assurance is the most cost effective and convenient way to stay current with the latest versions of our products.
Software assurance is the set of processes and activities set in place to ensure that software systems within an organization comply with internal and external requirements, standards and procedures. The need for software assurance arises out of necessity to control costs, adhere to timelines, and minimize risks of software not performing as intended or posing security risks to the organization.
Software Assurance is a Microsoft ‘Subscription’ that allows you to get free upgrades to the next software version without having to buy another license. As of July 2002, Microsoft has stopped selling upgrade versions of software in their volume licensing plans. If you purchased bulk copies of Office 2003 and then Office 2007 became available, without Software Assurance you must buy another license to be able to use the new version, upgrades do not exist anymore. Read more about Software Assurance from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/programs/sa/.
