<joshbilsky******.com> wrote in message
news:1189532982.067970.188180@o80g2000hse.googlegr oups.com...
> I've been testing WinVista Enterprise over the past few months and
> been reading up on the license schemes. It seems to me that for a
> medium-large corporate environment, a combination of KMS activation
> (for machines that regularly connect to corporate LAN) and MAK
> activation (for field site machines/laptops that could be off the
> network for a while) would be the most logical approach.
>
> With that being said, is there a way, post-image (I've seen mention of
> a vb script), to force the machine to use one or the other? We have an
> enterprise agreement with MS so our Vista Enterprise DVD does not
> prompt for a key code during installation. I wasn't sure if the
> activation is something that needs to be set prior to image capture.
> The ideal situation would be to maintain a single "production" image
> that could be used with either activation scheme depending on the
> purpose of the machine.


Create your image using the product key that is embedded in the Enterprise
installation DVD. They key is the KMS key.

When activating via KMS...

cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato (this assumes your KMS server
is properly registered with DNS)

will activate using the embedded product key against your KMS server


Activating with MAK

cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ipk <your MAK product key here>

followed by

cscript.exe c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato

to perform the activation