Exchange 2007 Packaging, Licensing, and Pricing

Exchange Server 2007 is offered in two editions, Standard and Enterprise, differentiated by a few key scalability and availability capabilities and priced exactly the same as their Exchange Server 2003 predecessors. However, rather than a single Client Access License (CAL) being required for each user or device, two different CALs are required for each client to access the complete server feature set. As a result, the licensing of Exchange becomes more complicated and the aggregate price will rise for organizations that want to access some of Exchange Server 2007’s most compelling new features.

Two Server Editions

With Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft continues its longtime practice of offering a Standard Edition (SE) and an Enterprise Edition (EE), the latter containing scalability and availability enhancements targeted at organizations with large numbers of users or stringent service level requirements.

In the past, one of the major differences between the editions was mailbox storage capacity—for example, Exchange Server 2003 R2 SE’s mailbox storage is capped at 75GB while Enterprise Edition has no artificial limit. With the introduction of Exchange Server 2007, SE customers get unlimited mailbox storage capacity. However, two other historical points of differentiation remain: automatic failover using clustering and the ability to subdivide the mailbox data storage.