A few months ago some friends of mine at Microsoft told me about a step-up promotion
that was going on for the release of Visual Studio 2010. If you purchased a
license for Visual Studio 2008 through Volume Licensing, it would translate into the
next version up for the 2010 version. Seems fairly straightforward but here
is the actual process:
So we upgraded our licenses to benefit from the step up. Problem was, we couldn’t
access any of the applications we were licensed to use (after RTM, obviously).
After a week or so of back and forth with Microsoft we finally got it squared away.
A lot of manual cajoling in the MSDN Sales system, I suspect, took place. It
turns out a lot of people were running into this issue.
Someone told me this issue got elevated to Steve B (not our specific issue, but the
step-up issue in general). I’m curious where things actually went wrong.
I suspect the workflow that was in place at the business level wasn’t in place at
the technical level, so everything ended up becoming a manual process. However,
that is purely speculative. Talk with Steve if you have questions.
In the end, everything worked out. I got Visual Studio 2010 installed (which
fricken rocks, btw), and my productivity will go up immensely once we get TFS deployed.
After of course, it has the necessary drop while I’m downloading and playing with
the new MSDN subscription.
For those that are interested in the promotion, it’s still valid until the end of
April. Contact your account rep’s if you are interested.
