Appendix: SharePoint Licensing and Packaging Changes

SharePoint has undergone significant licensing and packaging changes since its launch in 2001. The timeline below is especially useful for determining license entitlements under Software Assurance (SA), understanding licensing and packaging differences between the current version and previous versions, providing context for previous purchasing decisions (e.g., “Why did we buy licenses for ‘X’?”), and understanding past special offers and accommodations that may have resulted in “free” licenses that do not show up in an official Microsoft Volume License Service Center (VLSC) license statement. Note that all prices quoted in the timeline are the highest price (U.S. dollars) a business customer in North America would have paid through a volume purchasing program (Open).

May 2010: SharePoint Server 2010 Available

SharePoint Server 2010, the successor to SharePoint Server 2007, was built on top of SharePoint Foundation 2010, a free download for Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 customers.

Windows SharePoint Services renamed SharePoint Foundation 2010. As before, the free add-on for Windows Server includes tools and services for creating and managing team collaboration sites and provides basic services on which SharePoint Server relies. Along with the name change, SharePoint Foundation gets several additional capabilities, including the core run-time components of Business Connectivity Services, which enables SharePoint sites to present data from external data sources. (See the sidebar “SharePoint Foundation 2010“.)