I am a little confused on how to license Office in RDS

I spoke to a licensing specialist at ingram micro and he tells me I need to buy an open license for each user.

But I found this documents from microsoft that say I can license by either user or by desktop

The devices on my network are thin clients. Does licensing by device for RDS have to be a windows desktop or can a thin client work?

Hi,

Based on my research, desktop applications such as the Office Suite are licensed per device, not per user.  The following comes directly from the Microsoft Product Use Rights document dated January, 2010:  You must acquire a license for each device on or from which you access or use the software (locally or remotely over a network)You may access copies of the software installed on a network device only from a device that has a license for the software.

In other words, if you can walk up to a device and use it to interact with an Office application, you must have an Office license for that device.  It doesnt matter whether that device is a PC or laptop that has the Office bits installed on its local hard drive, or whether it is a thin client device that allows you to connect to a XenApp server, you need to have assigned a license to that device.

That begs the question of what assigned means, and the answer particularly for devices like thin clients, where you couldnt install the application locally if you wanted to is that you are on the honor system.  You decide, in the privacy of your own conscience, which licenses you are assigning to which devices with the caveat that, if youre ever audited, youd better be able to produce a license for every device people are using to run Office apps.  You can reassign a license from one device to another, but not more often than every 90 days.

Quote from:

http://www.mooselogic.com/blog/licensing-office-in-a-remote-desktop-environment

Regards,

Yan Li