SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Used by Employees

Providing users with access to SharePoint Server 2010’s core functions requires purchase of a variety of different licenses for servers as well as clients. Microsoft often uses the term “SharePoint Server 2010 Standard” to refer to a system where servers have Standard Client Access License (CAL) features enabled. These expose the product’s core team collaboration, corporate portal hosting, enterprise search, Web content management, and document management features but not a small group of features that require Enterprise CALs.

To provide increased scale, higher availability (fault tolerance), and better manageability, the SharePoint Server 2010—based system depicted in the illustration is implemented using multiple servers, each operating in a dedicated role. The Web servers (1) handle the display of the site; the application servers (2) run various services such as a usage and health data collection service, secure store service (for single sign-on authentication), and the Office Web App hosting service; and the crawl, index, and query servers (3) handle all search-related functions. Servers in all three roles run SharePoint Server 2010 code and must each be allocated a SharePoint Server 2010 server license, as well as be licensed for the underlying OS (Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter edition of Windows Server 2008/2008 R2).