Blog of the EMEA SBS Team

[This post comes to us courtesy Rituraj Choudhary]

We have had a couple of queries where people wanted to purchase SBS 2003 or SBS 2000 Client Access Licenses. We no longer have an option to purchase the same with the advent of SBS 2008. We can only purchase SBS 2008 CALs now. So, what do we do?

Well, we can exercise the Downgrade Rights. Downgrade Rights, with respect to SBS, is a way we can downgrade SBS 2008 licenses for the earlier versions of the SBS product offerings. Of course, you cannot separate out the components of the SBS solution. If you downgrade, you must downgrade all components of the software.

Please use the following chart to view the available downgrade options:

If you have purchased SBS 2008 CALs from the Volume Licensing (VL) channel, you will be given SBS 2003 CAL keys at the time of purchase; these keys can then be used for downgrade SBS 2008 CALs to SBS 2003 (R2).

For those of you who have purchased SBS 2008 CALs from channels other than VL, such as FPP and OEM, based on the country you are in, you can either call or e-mail to get the product keys for SBS 2003 CALs as you downgrade your SBS 2008 CALs. You must have the earlier version of the SBS media already available with you.

For EMEA region you need to email direct-mar@msdirectservices.com or call us at 0044 870 60 10 100 (UK) and ask the Customer Representative to transfer your call to the direct services. The complete list of the contact information for all the regions can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/contact.aspx

Reference:

A full-fledged document is already available on the following Microsoft site: http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/downgrade-rights.aspx. With this blog post we would just like to make it more visible.