SBS 2008 licencing

Oh bugger, oh well.... I have a volume licensing account, is the eopen account the same thing?

i dont think open license includes SBS.

Yep same thing eopen is just the old name. You can logon at https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/

It does as i have the licence agreement in front of me :)

I believe that you can activate SBS 2008 with an olk/vlk, but you can't activate it with an OEM key for obvious reasons.

I don't have oem, just have a proper open licence agreement with my licence agreement number and authorization number, so do you think this will work then?

http://duitwithsbs.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/sbs-2008-media-for-open-licensing-purchases/

This link should help.

To the best of my knowledge you do not need a "media kit" to buy a volume license. That is the point of volume licensing, one optional media kit, or download, and as many volume licenses as you require. This is all managed through th eopen licensing site. as mentioned earlier you should be able to convert from the TechNet version to fully licensed with the slmgr command.

Small business server edition is not truly a volume licensed product.  Due to the software restrictions you are only allowed to have one instance of this software on a network.  It is available as eopen from a company perspective, but you can only get a product key from a media kit.

I knew it was available through the volume licensing but did not know you were compelled to but the media kit. Regardless of how the license is obtained you should be able to install the key, and activate, or even reset activation if already activated.

philipgecko you said; "would I be able to activate the software using my open license agreement activation details". I assume this means you already have your e-license? If so use slmgr and try to activate or install using your CDKey, as a test. You can always reinstall on the same hardware and re-activate if you are wanting to do some preliminary testing. This way you would know right away before wasting time doing final setups.
As Elwin3 stated, you can also "rearm" any version  any version of Vista, Win7, SBS2008, or Server 2008 up to 4 times the trial period, without activating if you want to test. This again is done using   slmgr /rearm

Thanks for this, all I have is an email from Microsoft detailing the volume licence details but no product key is provided just an authorisation number and licence number. I tried to install the sbs 2008 trial version from tech net but as soon as I logged into the server it wanted to activate and as I don't have a key I could not go any further, what a pain! I have ordered the media kit from Microsoft and they have said it can take up to 7 days to be delivered.  

Talk about making things complicated, you would have thought you can download this but apparently you can't and you do indeed have to rely on the media :s

If there is another way I'd be very grateful as I could do with installing this today/ tomorrow

According to Microsoft :
Evaluating Windows Small Business Server 2008 does not require that you activate the product or enter a product key.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=537ac5b3-9ac2-4667-916b-99928bca9f70&displaylang=en

You should be able to say no to the activation and use the server for while waiting for the media.

Yes that was what I thought so I was a bit surprised when it said that it had to be activated online immediately

If you checked the box "activate when on line" when doing the install it will want to do so.
Try opening an elevated command prompt (right click on cmd icon and choose "run as administrator" and enter    slmgr /rearm   It should re-establish the trial period.

Ok thanks for your help, will try it

This question has been classified as abandoned and is being closed as part of the Cleanup Program.  See my comment at the end of the question for more details.