How many 2016 home and business activations per live account

Question

How many 2016 office home and business can I licence with the 1 window live account?

i need to install on 60 pc's and not looking forward to creating multiple accounts. 

also has anyone had any luck using the offline installer to stop the need for multiple downloads.

Answer 1

Hi,

Welcome to Microsoft Community.

One can activate up to 25 licenses using the same Microsoft Account.

Note: you will have to keep a record of which product keys you have used on which machines.

However for larger companies, Volume Licensing are a better option as it includes deployment tools for volume activations.

Hope this information helps you. Please let us know if you need additional information.

Thank you.

Answer 2

Hello, and thanks for the information/update.  Let me explain my situation a little more, and hopefully it'll clarify things some.

firstly - we are a smb.  we purchase our 2016 office suites with our machines due to the fact that we are able to obtain the licenses, which are tied to the machines - and keep this software along with the machines for 4 to 5 years, which is cheaper than upgrading/purchasing Volume licenses for that many years.

2nd - i do maintain/keep all of my individual licenses for those machines so i have a 'audit' trail of the software on that machine for it's term of life.

the issue i really comes down to several things ..

1. if i have a key - why do i need to also associate/register that license with an online account?

2.. if i install the software, like i have on several machines earlier this year - how to i tell, from my 'secondary' registration process (once to activiate with the key, and the 2nd with online registration) which license is tied to which machine..because the licenses show a "number" of licenses" registered on this day - and there isn't any type of 'key' listed for those machines?  if the date of registration would show the last octet of numbers, then i'd know which license file is associated with each machine and i could re-install the correct license file with the correct machine and not have to 'call in' due to the fact that the 'license has exceeded' the number of installs for it.

Its really frustrating to try and work with this system due to this limitation, or perhaps my understanding of the rules (like i didn't now that there was a 25-max/online account limitation) .

:(

Answer 3

Hi Harsha,

Thank you for this info, no-one we've spoken to at MS would accept there is any limit.

However, we have two issues with using this method for two separate customers - with the first customer we were able to associate 10 licenses to their MS Account, but after we added the 11th and 12th, we couldn't access them - we can still see the original 10. This means that we only are able to activate 10 of the 12 purchased products - not acceptable! With the second customer it got worse, we were only able to associate 7 licenses, the 8th is not accessible.

So far MS has been totally unhelpful, we've spoken to general technical support and the activation/accounting support and neither has offered any explanation or solution. They've only been able to manually re-activate one of the existing accessible licenses.

Regards,

David.