Practical Technology

So we're doing a Microsoft audit, and one of the larger points of contention is MSDN Professional versus MSDN Premium.  Mainly, why do we need Premium?  After all, Pro costs ~$1.2k/head, where Premium costs $6k/head!  Crazy! The lead devs are asking me this, and I'm confused...Microsoft does not make it clear WHY you need the Premium vs. Pro beyond 'if you're using any enterprisey applications (i.e. BizTalk, in our case), you need it'.  I tell the lead devs this.  They tell me...but the devs are currently using Pro, and yet can still develop for BizTalk...so why bother with Premium? Hm.  You'd think MS would block the code around BizTalk or something...guess not! Well it turns out that this is not a functional requirement, but a license compliance requirement.  If you are developing in a dev/test environment that has BizTalk Server installed, you MUST have a Premium subscription.  Honour system thing, I suppose. If you check the MSDN subsc...

Keeping this short and sweet, have another post to write... Super-simple to enable - just update software on the phone and management point The bling...pictures from the phone straight into AD/Exchange.   Password resets/unlocks on the fly - huge benefit for our environment. Most other AD functionality (group management, account settings, etc) straight from the phone. View locked-out accounts, disabled accounts, etc from the phone. For the cost - $2/month for a DC, this is a stupid no-brainer to buy.  We'll be doing our DCs, vCenter, and file server for sure.  $8/month!   Everybody needs this.  Srsly.