Re: CALs for SharePoint Intranet access

Thanks to you for taking the trouble to post this summary.

I've passed it on to a contact in Microsoft with the hope that a confusing situation might in time be less confusing.


Mike Walsh

richard@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Thank you for all your help on this. In the end, we lost the
opportunity, the client declared 'substantial unease' with Microsoft
and said that they didn't want to proceed since their legal counsel
said that they didn't want to carry the risk of exposure to future
license audits if Microsoft were to change the story in the future!

The short version of this is that the open source advocates within the
organisation did a big finger-pointing and 'told you so' exercise at
Microsoft and were able to say that open source was cheaper, better
and with a lot less legal risk!

However, we did learn a lot about MOSS licensing (a lot of it
contradictory), but our understanding coming out of this is:

- You can use Internet and Server/CAL models on the same server, the
September 2007 product guide has a 'concession' in it to accomodate
this use;
- The definition of Extranet vs Intranet came down to an
interpretation of the 'purpose' of the content as much as the form of
access, so if you open up your Intranet to external users in order to
make it an Extranet, you still need CALs since there is content with
an 'internal purpose'. However, if the Extranet is genuinely to
collaborate on content with external users, then CALs aren't required.
This is so open to interpretation that it becomes meaningless (and
hence the legal exposure for organisations);
- We did get a statement that if the Internet license is used, you
needed to buy a Server license in addition, along with CALs for the
content managers for the Internet content. The licensing guide implies
otherwise, we're still waiting for a clarification;

We did, in the end, get the answer we wanted, but it came too late for
the client and after too much pain.... if you use MOSS07 to publish
static HTML content, you can copy/re-publish the content to a static
IIS website and thereby not need a CAL for every user reading that
content. However, you would still need CALs for the content managers
and anyone accessing the MOSS managed site. These is perfect since it
allows the 1000's of users that may look at the Intranet rarely (or
never) to not require a CAL. For those users that want to actually use
an Intranet that is integrated with MOSS functionality, then the cost
of a CAL is justified.... in reality, for this client, over the next 3
years, they would have 'migrated' all their users in this manner, it
was just the cost of 3,000 - 4,000 CALs to view HTML that they had
problems with!

Overall, a loss all round, the client didn't get MOSS (which they
wanted), Microsoft didn't get the $100k + licensing that was at the
heart of this, plus the $100k's as users migrated over to MOSS and we
didn't get the implementation project!

Why is this so hard and why can't Microsoft admit when the licensing
model is lacking and try to be more flexible!!

As for dotnetnuke, thanks for that info, we did look at it, but the
timescales were just too short and we weren't able to validate how our
solution set would work on top of this platform in time for the bid.
We will however most definitely look at it over the next month or two
so that we've got an alternative the next time we face this problem!

.

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