Server-Side Licensing

Besides requiring licensing for SharePoint Server, all servers in an organization’s internal SharePoint deployment must be licensed for Windows Server, and one or more servers will need to be licensed for SQL Server and possibly others for FAST for SharePoint.

SharePoint Server

The full SharePoint Server 2010 product comes in only one server edition for internal use, unlike other Microsoft server products such as Windows Server and Exchange that are also licensed with Client Access Licenses (CALs). These other products come in at least two server editions, Standard and Enterprise, which generally differ with respect to IT-focused capabilities such as scalability and fault tolerance (but not end-user features).

However, like most other server-CAL-licensed products, SharePoint does offer multiple tiers of end-user features that require different CALs. The software associated with the SharePoint Server 2010 server license (US$4,926) contains code to implement features that require a SharePoint 2010 Standard CAL as well as features that require a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise CAL. During product configuration, the administrator must explicitly choose to enable Enterprise CAL—level capabilities. This is done for license compliance purposes and is mainly an attempt to prevent organizations from inadvertently enabling features that require the purchase of Enterprise CALs.