Licensing for Internet Use

Customers using SharePoint Server to construct Internet or extranet sites accessed by nonemployees—such as customers or business partners—can choose between two licensing approaches. While customers can use the server-CAL approach, it may not be practical for the organization to identify the set of users or devices that would require CALs, or the set of possible users could be so large as to make CAL purchases prohibitively expensive. To address such situations, Microsoft offers an alternative specifically for licensing nonemployee users.

While most other Microsoft server products licensed under the server-CAL model provide an alternative to CALs for licensing nonemployee users—usually in the form of an External Connector license—SharePoint’s alternative model is unique. Rather than require customers to buy two different server licenses for each server—a license for the right to run the server software and a separate External Connector license to allow an unlimited number of clients to access the software running on the server—SharePoint bundles both these rights into a single license.