The number of licenses his company needed to purchase seemed high for a company with only 23 employees. However, Microsoft employees brokering the deal said Imagineering would need licenses not only for its own employees using the new system but also for any customers who wanted to access it.

After Imagineering secured the product from Microsoft, it had trouble deploying the product, and so in October of 2005 it contacted Microsoft technical support, MacMillan said. "They determined we were given bad presale information and that the product would not work the way we had been told it would," he said.

Microsoft also informed Imagineering that it did not need licenses for its customers and had indeed purchased too many, he said.

The companies worked together to come up with a solution, which MacMillan said was to give Imagineering a credit equal to what it paid Microsoft to purchase the follow-up version of LCS, OCS, from Microsoft distributor TechData once that product was available. TechData also would provide Imagineering with the licenses it would need for its deployment, he said.

Microsoft released OCS in late 2007. Around that time, MacMillan said he contacted TechData about acquiring the product and the licenses, per the company's agreement with Microsoft. TechData informed him that it had no record of such a deal, he said.