Dragon Professional Group Renewals in Australia: Maintenance and Support Explained

If your organisation owns Dragon Professional Group licences, the licences themselves do not expire. What expires every year is the Maintenance and Support (M&S) contract attached to them. That annual renewal is what keeps your organisation entitled to upgrades and vendor support. In older Nuance documentation the same product appears as Maintenance and Upgrade Assurance (MUA) — it is the same annual renewable entitlement.

This article covers what M&S actually gives you, what happens when it lapses, and where to get a quote in Australia.

What Maintenance and Support Actually Covers

Maintenance and Support is two things bundled into one annual fee.

Maintenance is the right to receive new versions of Dragon Professional Group when Microsoft / Nuance ships them. With active M&S, your organisation can upgrade to the latest available version at no additional licence cost. Without it, you stay on whatever version you currently hold and have no contractual entitlement to upgrade.

Support is portal access to the Microsoft / Nuance support engineering team for technical cases that need vendor escalation — Windows compatibility issues, user-profile corruption, deployment errors, integration problems that can’t be resolved locally. Without active Support, the vendor escalation path is closed.

For Australian Government agencies and any organisation running Dragon at scale, an active M&S contract is usually also an audit requirement. Software asset registers typically require evidence of current vendor support coverage for productivity software in active use, and lapsed M&S shows up as an audit finding regardless of whether the software is functioning normally.

Renewing, Reinstating, and Where to Get a Quote

Renewal is straightforward when M&S is still active. The renewing organisation sends seat count and M&S anniversary date to an authorised Australian reseller, receives a quote against current channel pricing, raises a purchase order, and the channel processes the renewal. Users see no change — there are no new licence keys to deploy and no end-user disruption.

Lapsed M&S is more complicated. Reinstatement requires Microsoft / Nuance channel approval on a case-by-case basis, and approval is not guaranteed. Microsoft does not always approve backdated reinstatement, particularly where the lapse has been long. Where reinstatement is approved, the organisation typically pays for the lapsed period as well as the new renewal period.

If your M&S has lapsed, the first step is an eligibility check with the channel — there is no charge for that assessment and it tells you whether reinstatement is likely to be approved before any commitment is made.

For a current renewal quote, eligibility check on lapsed M&S, or to discuss moving users from Dragon Professional Group perpetual to Dragon Professional Anywhere subscription at renewal, you can renew Dragon Professional Group Maintenance and Support directly through the Voice Recognition Australia renewals page. Voice Recognition Australia has been the authorised Nuance / Microsoft channel reseller for Dragon Professional Group in Australia since 1999 and processes renewals for federal, state and territory government agencies as routine business.

Voice Recognition Australia is the authorised Australian Dragon distributor since 1999. Dragon and related marks are the property of Nuance Communications (Microsoft).