The Xena Blog

More than you ever wanted to know about MSDN Subscriber Downloads

It's been a while, so here's what's up with Subscriber Downloads:

1.  Just spent nearly two full weeks with the several teams that run the various aspects of the subscription program to come up with the architecture for the new MSDN Subscriber Downloads login page.  It looks like with the next major release (due about mid-next-year) we'll be able to have multiple subscriptions associated with a single Passport, in some cases we'll know about them automatically and in all other cases we'll provide an "add subscription to this Passport" functionality.  There are still some issues around TechNet subscription integration and LadyBugg integration - so I'm not committing to these as yet.

2.  Build 1247 of Windows Server 2003 requires a different key type, so I've pulled the build until we get this figured out.  Basically, 1247 requires an activation key for the 32-bit and AMD 64-bit builds, but not the IA64 builds.  I don't really want to publish production keys for a test build, and I don't want to tell customers to use their one WS03 key for a test build, so I'm looking at options. Let me know your thoughts on how you as a customer would like this handled if you like - the third option is to give some keys to the customer service reps and let them give one out to those subscribers who ask for them.

3.  Pretty much everything from the January 05 media shipment is in Xena, with the exception of WS03 SP1 1247.  Academic Alliance customers will get Virtual PC for Mac 7.0 here in the next few days, but that's about it in terms of new content.

Comments

Sean Timm said:

How about fixing the tree to work with FireFox? The only reason I visit any of the MSDN sites with IE instead of FireFox is due to Microsoft's seeming inability to create a fully functional tree control that works in both IE and FireFox. I'm sure I'm not alone, so consequently, you guys probably get an artificially inflated view of IE browser usage on MSDN.
# November 17, 2004 11:16 AM

Reinhard Schuerer said:

We downloaded the Windows XP AMD64 Build 1247 version from MSDN and tried to get an working product for it. We phoned with a lot people of MSDN and Certified Partner support and a lot other hotlines here in Germany but nobody could tell us how to get an working product key for the installation / upgrade.
We also tried the Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server Product key for it but none of them is acepted by this build.
How to get a product key for this build without being part of the official beta program ?

Regards,
Reinhard Schuerer
nascom GmbH
# November 17, 2004 2:58 PM

Andy (MS) said:

I'm working on the 1247 keys now, my apologies for the delay. There's some really sticky issues around beta keys (some require activation, some don't), and I can't take the chance of shotgunning the wrong key onto the site and then having it cause even worse problems. As soon as I get it fixed I'll put up a post here.
# November 17, 2004 4:14 PM