Phase 2: Tracking down the TFS license key.

Here's an update on trying to track down our TFS 2008 license key (a.k.a product key). For background see my post last week. If you're struggling with how to get your license key for TFS 2008, check out Martin's post or Brian's post. Both are very helpful.

From what I understand; Our company of 33,000 buys Microsoft software from a procurement vendor who in return buys it from Microsoft distributor who buys it from Microsoft (or something like that). Getting product keys always seems to be an issue.

Luckily we just got it figured out. There is a small body of people who can download "licensed" versions of software from Microsoft which have the license key embedded in the install. Unfortunately these people don't always know they have such powers, or they don't advertise themselves very well.

Anyway, we found a person who was able to download the standard edition of TFS 2008 for us, and then using Martin's post (above) we grabbed the "Product Key" and updated our trial edition of TFS 2008. Like Martin suggested; just to make sure, we used Brian's TFSVersionDetection and everything was kosher.

Now that was not that hard was it!