The new anti-piracy and validation tools that Microsoft plans to ship starting with Windows Vista and Longhorn Server will help ensure that there will be little corporate uptake of these operating systems in 2007, according to analysts.

That is because when Windows Vista is released to manufacturing in the next month, it will include the volume-license KMS (key management service), which will also be available for the beta of Windows Server Longhorn.

The same applies to Microsoft's Volume Activation Management tool, which will help with proxy activation. That tool can be run on a single machine that talks to all the machines in, say, a lab, and harvests the hardware identity data from them.

The single proxy machine talks to Microsoft, gets the activation identities back for all the machines, and then shoots this out to those machines and activates them. Customers can also use this method to activate their entire organization.

For more on this topic, see Column: John Parkinson on Waiting for Vista, Patiently

But the problem is that many enterprises are not allowed to run client or beta server software in production environments, so they will not be able to use these new tools until they are made available for existing production servers like Windows Server 2003, which is expected some six months after Vista is released to manufacturing.

"Those who are affected by this will have to get a waiver from their IT organization, use MAK [Multiple Activation Keys] or even OEM-activated machines," Thomas Lindeman, senior product manager for Microsoft's Software Protection Platform, told eWEEK.

"That has been the roughest thing we have gone through with this new platform and the new technologies, and we just couldn't get that worked on in time," he said.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: New Anti-Piracy Tools Will Delay Enterprise Adoption of Vista

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