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Before we started imaging machines with Windows 7, I thought I better get this KMS stuff figured out. For those of you who skipped Vista like we did, KMS is Key Management Service. It’s an interesting way of activating volume license keys on a network, and is a result of software piracy. Regardless of whether we like it or not, it’s here and we have to deal with it. I followed all of the documentation in the Volume Activation 2.0 Planning Guide but when I went to enter my Windows 7 KMS key onto my Windows 2008 Server that is my KMS Host, I received an error message (0xC004F015) and was unable to proceed. After more reading, making phone calls, and ultimately opening a support case with Microsoft, I have found the answer.

When installing a product key for Windows 7 into your KMS host, you need to install a Windows 2008 R2 product key instead. Apparently the Windows 2008 R2 product key also activates Windows 7 clients. Another caveat, don’t install the Windows 7 KMS license code actually on a Windows 7 computer. If you do, it turns your machine into a Windows 7 KMS host and will activate other clients on your network (but if you decide to do this anyway, make sure the computer is always on and probably not someone’s laptop). There is a generic product key that you need to install on your Windows 7 clients that will be activating against your onsite KMS. You can read this article for more information, as well as the product keys.

I’m not sure who at Microsoft decided that they would create an entirely new “normal.dot” file and go against everything that we’ve been taught. Specifically, I’m talking about Word in MS Office 2007. The default font is now Calibri for the body, and Cambria for headings. I’ve seen countless laser printers struggle this these fonts, as they are not standard fonts. To further complicate things, the font size is 11, not 10 or 12 that has been standard since the manual typewriter.

The default margins have been moved back to 1” after being at 1.25” left and right in Office 2003. But now they have changed default paragraph spacing from the standard 1 line to 1.15 lines.

I know, this is nothing new. After all, that’s Office 2007. It just pissed me off enough today that I thought I would spout off about it. I’m working on a new magazine article and have been somewhat irritated!