Is the Microsoft Action Pack right for your small business?

A good number of small businesses who are a "Microsoft Shop" spend money on the Microsoft Action Pack subscription. What the Microsoft Action Pack provides is most of the Microsoft software catalog for your business to use, as long as you keep paying the yearly subscription fees. Some of the software you do receive (there is quite a bit and doesn't apply to most small businesses so i'll keep it short) is 10 licensed copies of Windows XP, 10 licensed copies of Office Enterprise edition, one copy of Microsoft Windows 2003 server, and others like a copy of SQL Server. For 400 bucks a year that sounds like a score right? You get all that software for a few hundred dollars per year. You could have 10 workstations with Windows XP and Office 2007. If you were to go out yourself and purchase all that software it would be double or triple that number right? Microsoft XP Pro alone is in the triple digits for each copy. You could be put back over a thousand dollars for 10 copies. This is a deal then right? Well it depends how you look at it. As soon as you stop subscribing to Microsoft Action Pack you are no longer allowed to legally use those software licenses. If you actually purchased 10 copies of Windows XP Pro and used them on PCs for 4 years it would be cheaper then buying the Microsoft Action Pack and renewing it for 3 years after. You are leasing the software, you do not own it. As soon as your subscription is gone, so is your legal right to run that software. You also would be a bit tied into Microsoft products as well if you wanted to get the most out of your subscription. Not that it is a bad thing for XP or Office but if there is a piece of software that your business needs that is of better quality from another company you would have to spend more money or miss out (For example the open source MySQL is better for databases then SQL Server a Microsoft Product)

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Sometimes spending a good amount of money up front is cheaper in the long run.