Get Flexible CS6 Volume Licensing with Adobe’s “Business” Program

One of the most popular articles on our site is How Many Systems Can I Run Adobe CS6 On? That covers Adobe’s single user rules for their standard off-the-shelf retail software purchased for home or home office use.  But how about for the rest of the world – for groups, teams, businesses, studios, companies, schools, and other organizations? What if you need an open license to run Creative Suite 6 (or other products) concurrently with multi-users on a number of computers on your network?

Fortunately Adobe has an answer for this that makes sense – that’s easy and saves time with reduced maintenance via simple license management across your site… Why shuffle and keep track of individual serial numbers between different machines? Why worry about whether your software needs to run on a PC or a Mac?

It’s called the Adobe Business Store (formerly known as the Volume Licensing Program) – but it’s not just for businesses, it’s for any person or enterprise that needs to run Adobe applica­tions with multiple seats, and it has some pretty great advantages:

1. You can purchase however many licenses you need online with a credit card or PayPal, immediately without any paperwork or signature contracts to deal with.
2. You receive a single serial number for your entire group that you can freely switch between your computers, including between PC/Windows and Apple/Mac.
3. The actual software is completely the same as the standard versions, and you can add additional users at any time while keeping the same single serial key.
4. There are no restrictions as to who can use the software or when, so long as the total number of licensed users doesn’t exceed the number of seats purchased.
5. And it costs no more than normal on Adobe.com, plus you can still download the software online for free (and/or receive the CD/DVD media via mail). You can also convert a free CS6 trial to a permanent business license without reinstallation.

Adobe has one other name for this site licensing plan – it’s also called the Transactional Licensing Program (TLP). That’s because the benefits are available for individual transactions (with no mini­mum order size), rather than needing contracts, signatures, and membership as with their other “Open Options” offering, the Cumulative Licensing Program (CLP, which is used by larger organizations with higher ordering thresholds).

Note Adobe also has separate versions of these two programs for education, where customers at educa­tional institutions like schools, universities and colleges can receive academic discounts together with the flexibility of running the software on as many computers as needed.

Once you get your software, you can use Adobe’s straightforward Licensing Web Site (LWS) to easily track and manage licenses, which simplifies software administration and streamlines recordkeeping and legal compliance.

Some more quite interesting features (see all the details here):

• Just like with Adobe’s off-the-shelf software, these volume licenses are transferrable or resellable to other entities, if such need arises.
• Similarly, you can run each license on up to two computers (office and home/portable), so long as the second copy of the software is used solely for the benefit and business of the licensee, and the two copies are not used at the same time.
• Ordinarily, it takes some effort to switch CS6 between platforms. But all volume licenses here are cross-platform and you can run them on whichever system you want, Windows or Mac OS or both.
• Adobe no longer offers older versions via retail, but if you need CS5.5 instead you can still get it by ordering CS6 and then downloading a prior version (or “downgrading”) – see the Backward Licensing Policy. Read more about this in our related story on how to buy older Adobe software.
• If you need to set up a flexible or floating license scheme across a network of computers for concurrent use, that may be possible as well for some customers (with CLP).

If you are currently running individual boxed Adobe products and would like to move from shrinkwrapped software to one of these volume licenses, Adobe will also offer a credit against past qualifying purchases.

So whether you’re private, commercial, education, or government, this is something to consider from several advantageous angles. Geographically it’s available world­wide in the US/Canada, Europe/UK, Asia, Australia/NZ, and Africa – just go to the Adobe Store Selector and select your country, and then “Business Store.”  That’s all there is to it – you can buy and down­load (or ship) your volume-licensed product with your local currency and address… or get an Instant Quote for the products you’re interested in.

Footnote:  If you’re interested in the Creative Cloud tools and services, then Adobe reportedly will offer a Creative Cloud Team Edition later this year, which will have similar features to the volume/business licenses described above, but be on a term-based membership (annual or monthly subscrip­tion basis) instead.  How to tell – is the Creative Cloud right for you?