We are a small business providing IT products and support for a number of small to medium businesses in our local area. Providing new PCs with MS Office has long been a big part of what we do. With Office 2013 OEM, it seems that activation requires creating
a unique MS account for each installation with no obvious way around it.
This is utterly stupid. Office is supposed to activate on HARDWARE - not an individual. Companies that have many computers and a high turnover of staff use the same computer for many different people. Linking Office to an individual's email account is
a very bad idea - especially in a business environment where using personal email is not acceptable.
Creating a company-wide MS account to activate all the software seemed like a usable workaround; until MS informed us that each activation had to be with a unique account.
Add on to this the confusion that many people face when asked to create an MS account of their own and activate their software (things that are completely unfamiliar to many of our customers) and MS seem to have created a support nightmare for us front-line
support engineers.
And what about re-installing Office in the future? If an MS account is created but only used for the Office Activation, surely it will expire after so long?
And what about customers that have no internet access? They do exist! How are they supposed to use the software?
MS have tried to cut out their long-time sales partners by introducing and pushing subscription-based Office 365, which eliminates the profit we made from selling physical products with machines - and the latest Office OEM versions that we CAN sell have
shot up in price to almost unsalable levels. Volume licensing is also not a solution for many businesses that simply do not have the cash flow to purchase large numbers of licenses at once. Customers also do not want to be tied in to subscription services
for software that they are used to owning outright with no recurring costs.
We desperately need an easy solution to this - any suggestions appreciated. Or should I just start recommending OpenOffice to our customers now?
Thanks,
Alex
EDIT 12/04/13:
It is even worse than I thought originally. I have just been contacted by a customer complaining that they activated their new Office 2013 using the Administrator account before rolling the machine out to their user, only to find that Office then prompted
the user to activate AGAIN when they logged on. it then refused to activate again, saying that it had already been activated!
This is completely unacceptable. Some customers have a large turnover of staff using the same machine; most require at least a couple of different users. What are MS playing at?