Microsoft Slow to Turn On Vista Activation Tools

Computerworld - Unlike most large organizations, the University of Oklahoma plans to deploy Windows Vista on more than one quarter of its 65,000 PCs by the end of this year.

Because of those early migration plans, Dennis Aebersold, the university's CIO, is already well versed in the new operating system's volume activation features. But Aebersold was disappointed to find that Microsoft Corp. has yet to release its Volume Activation Management Tool, which the school needs in order to use a proxy server to centrally activate multiple Vista desktops via a single connection to Microsoft's systems.

To meet Microsoft's requirement that Vista be activated and validated on systems within 30 days of installation, the university also plans to use an internally hosted Key Management Service developed by Microsoft to support automatic activations.

But Matt Singleton, the school's director of IT services, voiced concerns about that method of activation as well. He said Microsoft's KMS offers no user-based authentication, so to enable students who aren't connected to the university's network to activate Vista, the IT department will have to customize its firewall rules to allow only authorized users to access the system running the KMS.

"We believe the new volume-activation process can be beneficial for license compliance purposes," Aebersold said. "But the existing tools need more work and should have been released sooner."

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the Volume Activation Management Tool, or VAMT, is scheduled to be released in March. She said it contains a version of Microsoft's Multiple Activation Key (MAK) technology that works on a proxy server, plus other tools that the vendor has yet to disclose.

Another missing piece for early corporate adopters of Vista is KMS support for Windows Server 2003. Customers won't be able to run the KMS technology on that operating system until next month, said Cori Hartje, director of Microsoft's Genuine Software Initiative.

For now, that leaves users with a choice of running KMS off a Vista client machine, or a system with a beta copy of the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn. Even Hartje said the latter option isn't "a practical solution."

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said Microsoft was hoping that users would run KMS off Vista clients until the Longhorn server is available. But IT managers have pushed the software vendor to support Windows Server 2003.

"Customers don't want yet another machine somewhere to maintain," Silver said. "They have enough Win2003 servers out there that could handle running this extra service."

Microsoft released Vista to its volume license customers