I'm in IT at a company that is all on Windows 7 except for about sixteen Intel iMac's in our internal publishing department, my Macbook Air, an Xserve for the publishing department and about a dozen ancient iMac G5's scattered around and used as courtesy machines in public areas.
As I am about to replace the oldest of the publishing departments iMac's it seems like a good time to standardize on Lion as the new machines will automatically come with Lion and this is where I am losing my mind.
First of all, Apple's intensely generous personal use Lion licensing terms don't apply to businesses. The App Store is out of the picture except as a source of the install image.
Since I will only need eleven licenses of Lion to upgrade the balance of the machines that is not enough for Apple's volume licensing threshold of twenty. In the US Apple Store for Business you can buy individual Lion licenses:
OS X Lion - Apple Store for Business (U.S.)
You stick your stack of licenses in the filing cabinet incase the BSA kicks down your door and go on your merry way.
There is no Canadian Apple Store for Business. I am banging my head against the wall because when I try to call Apple I end up talking to somebody in the US who talks to me like I am retarded until they can't process the order themselves. At which point I sit on hold until I get another person who talks to me like I am retarded and have never heard of the App Store. The only lucid solution suggested by Apple was to gift Lion to the individual users iTunes accounts - but that would never get past accounting and Lion would then be licensed to them individually rather than to the company.
Has anyone here successfully obtained these licenses?
I am not sure how I deal with this without buying the worlds most expensive 4GB USB sticks or buying a bunch of redundant licenses, either of which will make me look like a bimbo and give more ammo to the rest of the IT slobs who seem bothered by the fact the macs are even in the building and latch on to any shortcoming to make their case.
And for the record obtaining licenses for Microsoft Office, Quark, Acrobat, Sophos, and FileMaker in these quantities through conventional volume licensing programs has never presented a problem.
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