SharePoint 2010 Licensing – Standard, Enterprise, FAST Search

 March 10th, 2011 › SharePoint › richard ›

It’s not always clear how licensing works with Microsoft, even when you visit the product page and compare editions for SharePoint 2010 you’re still left with scratching your head. To help, here’s a bullet list of things to keep in mind -

  • SharePoint 2010 Foundation (previously known as WSS 3.0) comes included with Windows 2008 Server Standard edition. You need Windows Server CALs for user access.
  • SharePoint 2010 Server is a server product that you install on-top of Windows 2008 Server and is licensed separately per server. You may see “Standard” or “Enterprise” but the server product comes in only one version and has only one SKU.
  • Standard & Enterprise CALs (client access licenses). Each user connecting to a SharePoint server needs a standard CAL. For users accessing enterprise features, they also need an enterprise CAL. Note – its not one or the other, but both (Standard with Enterprise CALs) if you decide to use  any of the enterprise features.
  • Summary of Enterprise CAL features -
    • FAST Search Centers
      • Sorting by any managed property
      • Contextual search results (i.e. user or audience targeted)
      • Refinement filter counts
      • Similar results
      • Thumbnails and previews
      • Visual best bets
      • Scale and other search platform enhancements
    • Business Intelligence
      • KPI’s
      • Chart Web Parts
      • Dashboards
      • Data Connection Library
      • PowerPivot for SharePoint
    • Access Services
    • Excel Services
    • InfoPath Services
    • Visio Services
    • PerformancePoint Services
  • Microsoft FAST Search Server for SharePoint – if using FAST Search Centers as part of the Enterprise CAL, you need a separate server license for each FAST server that will actually index and crawl content. Vice versa, if you want to implement Microsoft FAST Search – you need Enterprise CALs to access the search centers within SharePoint 2010.

Note, the above covers mostly intranet/extranet scenarios. Microsoft have specific versions of SharePoint 2010 for Internet sites that may also require Window External Connector licenses for your Windows 2008 servers, these versions also have Standard and Enterprise features and can be used with Microsoft FAST Search.

In addition to the above, the following links are also great resources for understanding SharePoint 2010 licensing

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The previous post is Extract WSP from SharePoint MOSS Solution Store and the next one is SharePoint 2010 Document Coauthoring