Microsoft Shuttering Dedicated Licensing Education, Certification Site (theregister.com) 12
Microsoft is retiring its "Get Licensing Ready" website, a resource for software licensing education. Going forward, content licensing will be located at microsoft.com/licensing. The Register also notes Microsoft's plans to enhance learning with AI tools, though specifics for licensing applications remain unclear. From the report: Software licensing is notoriously labyrinthine, so resources like the site Microsoft will close -- Get Licensing Ready -- can be very handy. Today, the site offers over 50 training modules plus documentation. But Microsoft has decided not to keep it around in its current form. Indeed, visitors to the site currently see a pop-up that explains "Microsoft will be ending support for licensing certifications through this platform and phasing out the Get Licensing Ready resource."
The site's "retirement" date is January 1. Users have until December 1 to complete any active modules and download certificates. If you're a user of the site, get cracking: Redmond warns it is "unable to provide copies of certification after December 31st, 2024." An email alias dedicated to the site will also go away on New Year's Day. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register the software megalith "remains committed to supporting licensing knowledge and solution-building for our partners and customers" -- in part with "new AI capabilities to further enhance learning and engagement."
The site's "retirement" date is January 1. Users have until December 1 to complete any active modules and download certificates. If you're a user of the site, get cracking: Redmond warns it is "unable to provide copies of certification after December 31st, 2024." An email alias dedicated to the site will also go away on New Year's Day. A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register the software megalith "remains committed to supporting licensing knowledge and solution-building for our partners and customers" -- in part with "new AI capabilities to further enhance learning and engagement."
This just in (Score:4, Funny)
Validatorians Unite! (Score:3)
Of the 13 visitors to the site over its lifetime, 8 were found to be LLM ingest scrapers.
And yet I find myself oddly curious; what would happen if I became a Microsoft Certified Microsoft Licensing Validatorian Professional? Do other Validatorians recognize me? Oh shit, do they get to wear a cool badge? DAMMIT. I’ll bet they do. Probably got a cool handshake too. I hear Jazz hands are no match for EULA slaps.
Re: (Score:1)
The MS Eye Chart Lives On (Score:2)
Backwards compatibility (Score:3)
As great as Windows is with backwards compatibility, their website is fucking atrocious for it. They regularly trash entire sections; sometimes it's just gone, but sometimes it's just redesigned or renamed and they keep the existing content but don't forward pages even to the new front page in many circumstances. This has left a massive trail of broken URLs throughout the internet, and I've lost count of the number of times I've found a single post offering a solution to a problem that's a link to technet or somewhere deep in MSDN (oh, sorry, "Learn") , only to get 404 from MS, nothing from their search, then Internet Archive hasn't ever crawled that URL.
Fuck MS. People who claim they're not as bad as the 90s are off their rocker.
Re: (Score:2)
MS has no strategy for anything. All they are doing is tactical decisions. And it is killing them slowly as complexity mounts.
Well, for MS (Score:2)
They're doing it wrong (Score:2)
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They should shutter their entire licensing department and just charge one price for software.
I imagine you intended sarcasm, but they really could cut costs that way. It wouldn't surprise me if they did. Some (I) might argue that the IRS could do the same.
I considered the MS Licensing Certification a few years back. I thought it had sunset it years ago. Maybe they just announced the end of the program. Either way, I don't think it would have helped anything in my career.