CDKEY is NOT a license?

[realized]

We got 30 dell computers almost a year ago with Office 2003 OEM, we had software/keys for each computer. They were all labled and put in a box and the box was sealed.

The box has gone missing (we just found this out as we are moving the office to another location).

Does this mean that legally i can not use office ?

Do you think dell has record of the OEM CDKEYS they gave me?

What do i do from here?

I have sales recipts etc.. but no cdkeys/media..

I have heard many times that a CDKEY is NOT a license and having a CDKEY doesn't mean you can use a microsoft product.. is this true? Am i fine ?

[tain]

I think that this depends on the vendor. Dell can probably help you out with this if you call them up and explain the situation.

[ZenCoder]

Tools exists if that will reveal your Microsoft Products CD Keys, so practically speaking you can recover the CD-Keys and write them down in case you ever need to them again (hard drive failure for instance).

In fact doing so would probably be a very good idea.

As far as the licensing, if you purchased the software from a legitimate source its licensed. Proving it in the event of a software audit is another matter.

I have no clue how software audits work.

However if you ordered the PC's and Office at the same time from Dell it should show up on the system summary when you enter the PC's Dell Service Tag. It may not say office though, just that the system had xxxx software kit installed.