SharePoint CAL’s who needs ‘em?
January 5, 2007
So here is a scenario i have recently been involved with and i thought it worth a post as it would easy to get caught out on this - “I’ve recently installed SharePoint Portal Server within the organisation. As a start I’ve purchased approximately 150 user CAL’s for the Portal, if I allow someone access to a portal site as a ‘Reader’ does that constitute usage of one of those licences or does it only apply to someone that can contribute and officially ‘use’ the site?
The answer to this question is as follows “organisations must acquire and assign a CAL to each device or user that accesses your instances of the server software directly or indirectly.” Therefore, even if the users are accessing the server to only read documents, they still require a CAL.
The licensing is an interesting hybrid. For employees you need a SharePoint Portal CAL as well as a Windows Server CAL, so in that sense SharePoint is building additional applications on top of Windows. It’s a rather expensive way to publish conventional read-only content.
For a public website you need the Internet edition instead of CALs, so here you are paying more for the CMS. In licensing terms, it is not an effective way to provide a conventional Intranet. http://www.airdesk.co.uk
I have 1,000 machines that need cal’s for sharepoint 2007 on them. What kind of deal can I get for that bulk of machines?