A while back, Microsoft released their new Click-To-Run (C2R) installer, primarily for Office365, but also for Visio and Project (standalone and volume-licensed).

The problem with this, is that existing (MSI based) installations of Visio and Project could not co-exist with the C2R installer. That's fine, because you can just install them using the C2R method right? Well, sort of.

Existing VLK\MAK license keys for the MSI version are also NOT compatible with the essentially exact same product that is installed using the C2R installer. Of course, this distinction is not made very clear anywhere prior to shelling out for O365.

The only solutions were; a) use a KMS which is fine if you have enough seats and KMS licensing (we don't).  b) Purchase entirely new licenses and write-off the cost of the existing ones.  c) Don't use Office365 and just stick to "regular" Office 2016 which is starting to no longer receive new features.

After >2 years of Microsoft being well aware of this issue and promising that they would be looking at a solution, they finally released "C2R-P" keys as a replacement. Great I thought, finally we can get this sorted.

Nope - These keys are only available via VLSC. They're not available via MSDN, the partner network, or their new My.VisualStudio portal. We don't have a login for VLSC, so once again we're in limbo.

I understand that volume licensing is Microsofts great obfuscated secret playground of money printing, but this seems like a ridiculous situation. "Just buy more licensing" for a product we already own just because they've changed the installer can't be acceptable.

If this was a consumer-level issue then it'd surely be a case for the ComCom I'd imagine. Is there a solution that doesn't involve throwing away another few thousand dollars to re-buy what we already have?

To make matters worse, most of the 1st-level support contacts haven't heard of C2R-P keys...