Is this true? sounds legit?

Question

Hi, ill try and sum this up quickly, our family business used to be run by my father and the IT was, over a decade ago, handled by a friend of his. That friend has since fallen out with the family but back around 2004 he supplied a copy of SBS2003 for us,
it was legit discs with keys/etc so we always thought it was a retail copy.
Fast forward to today and he has now sprung it on us that it's actually a licensed copy for which he claims has been paying £800 a year "out of respect for my father". He is now basically blackmailing us that if we don't agree to move to a Server
2012/Exchange 2013 licence with him he will have Microsoft shut down the license and our server will stop working.
Due to Exchange 2003 leaving support my plan had been to move to Office 365 and Server Essentials 2012 for local file storage and AD (we have <10 staff) which would have been a lot cheaper and far less overkill but he is basically saying we have until the
end of business today to agree to his terms or he's cancelling our license and Microsoft will shut our server down via remote, is this true/possible/likely?
Looking at our installation discs they do say "all use subject to volume licence agreement" on them :(
Thanks you

Answer 1

No, Microsoft will not arbitrarily deactivate an already activated OS. It does not, however, guarantee you are legal, and you may have some legal issues if he reports you as running pirated software.
For what its worth, I would not give in to extortion. Keep all communications. Get all licenses you were given. Make *immediate* plans to migrate to new licenses (your essentials/o365 plan) as soon as possible. And change all equipment and admin passwords
he may have ever had access to. That way he can't disable your systems, and if you do get a knock on the door from MS lawyers, you have credible evidence that you thought you were legal and are already pursuing a path to remain legal. MS is very willing to
work with companies to get them legal as long as they show a willingness to do so. You can then decide if you want to pursue potential criminal charges against the individual for attempted blackmail and software piracy since they sold you the licenses supposedly.