Keeping tabs on a sprawling software environment can be challenging. With a surge in work-from-home users, overwhelmed IT teams scrambling to respond, and a proliferation of Software as a Service opportunities that end users can quickly jump on by keying in their corporate credit cards, this problem has the potential to spiral out of control.

These problems can be solved with the right mix of technologies and practices, but unfortunately, simple barriers often stand in the way. Here is how to identify those barriers and overcome them.

Organizations are always looking to save money however they can. One commonly neglected approach to savings is software asset management (SAM), which implements practices and tools to manage the acquisition, deployment, use, maintenance and disposal of software. When used to its full potential, SAM can lead to impressive savings, particularly for organizations that have never…

I’d like to take a minute to spotlight the newly announced Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 product editions. This includes the all-new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, Visual Studio Professional with MSDN and the free Visual Studio Community edition – coming later this year. 

You’ve probably noticed a number of SQL-licensing-related blog posts here on the Solutions Blog recently. That’s for good reason. As I mentioned in my last post, the majority of all Enrollment for Application Platform (EAP) contracts are set to expire at the end of this month (March 2015). I went on to discuss a potential…

Years ago, Microsoft created a specialized Enterprise Enrollment called Enrollment for Application Platform or EAP.  It was designed to help provide better pricing on Microsoft’s platform products (SQL, Visual Studio, SharePoint and BizTalk).  Because traditional Enterprise Agreements are limited to organizations with 250 or more users, many customers with large platform investments were not able…