So what the heck is MSDN anyway? Is it really a subscription? Software assurance?
Microsoft requires our customers to license (pay for) every copy of every product deployed across the enterprise. This includes all physical and virtual instances. As such, licensing a development and test environment is not only expensive, but challenging to manage as new servers are created and torn down and fairly frequent basis.
MSDN represents the most convenient and least expensive way to properly license development & test environments. Licensed per person, MSDN is a blanket licensing product which enables management and licensing for all your team members with limited overhead and a convenient “per head” acquisition model.
MSDN is an asset acquired by the organization and assigned to a user. When the user leaves the role, the subscription is reclaimed and assigned to someone else.
MSDN grants unlimited access to nearly all servers, tools and desktop operation systems Microsoft produces for the purpose of development & testing; Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk, SharePoint, Host Integration Server, Exchange Server, all our Dynamics products, Microsoft CRM as well as Vista and Windows XP and much more.
As long as every person touching these servers has a corresponding MSDN subscription, we do not require any additional licensing or reporting. You may have 1000 instances of each product (for dev\test\demo) at no additional charge.
Further, there are many additional benefits including complimentary access to Office 2007, Project STANDARD and Visio all for day-to-day use as well as solution development, access to an online moderated newsgroup for real-time Q&A, ready access to download any product in the subscription via the Microsoft Subscriber download site, 4 Product Support Services incidents per subscriptions (per license period).
PSS incidents are full Premier Support incidents; each of which has a retail value of $400. Premier support is our pay-for support system. These are the same engineers who troubleshoot our Premier support customer who purchase support contracts for their production environments, and much, much more.
The complete list is available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscriptionschart.aspx
Courtesy of John Sanderson