Licensing SharePoint Server 2010

Tuesday, 17 August 2010

SharePoint 2010 is Microsoft's strategic platform for corporate portals, document management, team collaboration, Web content management, enterprise search, and business intelligence (BI). Several factors complicate SharePoint licensing, such as the product line's four different tiers of functionality, each with its own licensing particularities, and how SharePoint pulls in several other products as prerequisites.

This report is designed for organizations that need to budget for SharePoint 2010, identify licensing options and choose between them, and assure license compliance. It provides an organized introduction for readers who are new to SharePoint 2010 licensing and serves as a quick reference for experts. It identifies the SharePoint Server, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Office licenses that are required to deploy SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 on-premises. It also explains the differences between the various SharePoint license types, the rules governing how licenses are assigned and used, and the trade-offs of buying the licenses through different Microsoft volume licensing programs.

Introduction

SharePoint is Microsoft's strategic platform for corporate portals, document management, team collaboration, Web content management, enterprise search, and business intelligence (BI). Packaging, licensing, and pricing changes introduced with SharePoint Server 2010 in May 2010 include moving developer-related components from the commercial product into the free SharePoint Foundation offering, a 10% price increase for certain server and Client Access Licenses (CALs), a new server license covering use of higher-end search technology than is included in the base product, and an additional server license for Internet and extranet sites.

Retains Similar On-Premises Licensing Model

Licensing of SharePoint Server 2010 for on-premises use remains generally consistent with its predecessor, SharePoint Server 2007. The SharePoint 2010 product line offers four tiers of functionality, up from three in SharePoint 2007, with each tier being a superset of the one below. SharePoint is licensed using a server-CAL model, under which an organization purchases a server license for the right to run software on a server, and CALs for the right for users or devices to access the servers.

The four main tiers are as follows.

SharePoint Foundation. Formerly called Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Foundation 2010 includes tools and services for creating and managing team collaboration sites and provides basic services on which SharePoint Server 2010 relies. It is a free download that can be deployed by customers who have already purchased Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 server licenses and Windows Server 2008 CALs. (See the sidebar "SharePoint Foundation 2010".)

SharePoint Server with Standard CAL. The next tier of functionality is licensed by purchasing SharePoint Server 2010 server licenses along with a Standard CAL for each client. This level licenses SharePoint Server's core team collaboration, corporate portal hosting, enterprise search, Web content management, and document management features.

SharePoint Server with Standard and Enterprise CALs. The addition of the Enterprise CAL to SharePoint Server and the Standard CAL provides the right to use all SharePoint Server 2010 BI tools, as well as components that allow nonprogrammers to create certain types of business collaboration solutions without having to write custom code.

SharePoint Server with Standard CAL, Enterprise CAL, and FAST Search Server for SharePoint. Like its predecessors, SharePoint Server 2010 includes indexing and query capabilities for searching Intranet content. (Customers who want only these search capabilities can license a special-purpose edition of SharePoint called Search Server 2010; see the sidebar "Search Server 2010".) However, customers can get better search tuning, greater scale, and other improvements with FAST Search Server for SharePoint (FAST for SharePoint), which is based on technology Microsoft acquired with FAST Search and Transfer in 2008. FAST for SharePoint works only with SharePoint Server 2010 and requires SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise CALs. It also requires its own server licenses—which are four times as expensive as SharePoint Server 2010 server licenses—for a subset of servers that implement the search farm.

For scenarios involving Internet or extranet sites accessed by nonemployees, Microsoft continues to offer an alternative to the server-CAL model described above; customers can choose whichever model is less expensive or more practical to manage. Under the alternative model, SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites Standard licenses an instance of SharePoint that can be accessed by an unlimited number of nonemployee clients who utilize SharePoint Standard CAL-level features, while SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites Enterprise licenses nonemployees for the full SharePoint feature set as well as use of FAST for SharePoint. The SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites Enterprise license is similar to a predecessor, the SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites license, while the Standard license is new.

SharePoint Online Still Based on SharePoint 2007

SharePoint is available from Microsoft as a hosted service, providing organizations with the option to outsource all or some fraction of their SharePoint Server sites to run in data centers operated by Microsoft. It is available in three tiers: Dedicated, which gives each customer dedicated server hardware and has a minimum requirement of 5,000 seats; Standard, which uses shared server hardware and is available for organizations of all sizes; and Deskless Worker, which offers browser-based read-only access to material stored on a SharePoint Online collection. Microsoft also offers hosted Exchange Server, Communications Server, and the Live Meeting conferencing service; these services are available separately or in license packages, including the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

As of Aug. 2010, all three tiers of SharePoint online were still running SharePoint Server 2007. Before the end of the year, Microsoft is expected to upgrade the Dedicated tier (and possibly the other two tiers) to SharePoint Server 2010. However, it remains to be clarified how the online feature set will compare to SharePoint Server 2010 on-premises, what the feature differences will be between the three online tiers, and how the various levels of service will be licensed. For this reason, SharePoint Online licensing remains outside the scope of this report.

What's Ahead

This report outlines the licensing rules and costs for on-premises SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 systems. It provides an organized introduction for readers who are new to SharePoint licensing, but also provides a quick reference for experts.

Sections in the Licensing SharePoint Server 2010 Report:

SharePoint and Volume Licensing Programs

Overview of Microsoft's three types of volume licensing programs—Open, Select, and Enterprise Agreements—and how they can be used to purchase SharePoint Server—related licenses

Server-Side Licensing

The server-side licenses required for a SharePoint Server 2010—based infrastructure include server licenses for SharePoint Server, FAST for SharePoint, SQL Server, and Windows Server

Client-Side Licensing

Explains the set of Client Access Licenses (CALs) that clients of a SharePoint Server 2010—based system require; details subset of product features requiring an Enterprise CAL

Licensing for Internet Use

SharePoint Server for Internet Sites provides a way of licensing Internet or extranet sites accessed by nonemployees without having to purchase Client Access Licenses (CALs)

SharePoint On-Premises Licensing Scenarios