Boswell's Q&A
Brief Lesson on Exchange Licensing
Understand Exchange's per-server vs. per-user licensing implications and you'll save money down the road.
- By Bill Boswell
- 09/16/2003
Bill: I'm about to upgrade our seven-year-old
Macintosh e-mail server to a Windows 2000-based Exchange server. We'll
primarily be using the Exchange server as a POP server but would also
like to have a server-based address book.
Based on these specs, is it necessary to purchase client licenses for
each computer that will have a POP account set up and that will use the
public
address book?
—Joshua Stein, MCSD
Portland, Oregon
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Joshua: The license agreement for Exchange 2000 states
that you must have a CAL for any user who gains access to Exchange services.
This includes POP3, IMAP4, and OWA connections along with standard Outlook
clients.
Exchange 2000 has a per-server license and a per-user license. You should
opt for the per-user license so that you can set up a second server in
the future, if necessary. With per-user licensing, you'll need 1,000 CALs
if you have a thousand users with accounts on the Exchange server.
Exchange 2003 has a per-device CAL so that multiple users can access
the Exchange server via a kiosk machine and take only a single CAL. You
can purchase a mix of per-device and per-user CALs for the same Exchange
organization, but the License Service does not know how to differentiate
between them so you have to keep pretty careful records.
For extensive licensing information for Exchange and other servers,
check out http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/
server_overview.asp.
Hope this helps.
About the Author
Contributing Editor Bill Boswell, MCSE, is the principal of Bill Boswell Consulting, Inc. He's the author of Inside Windows Server 2003 and Learning Exchange Server 2003 both from Addison Wesley. Bill is also Redmond magazine's "Windows Insider" columnist and a speaker at MCP Magazine's TechMentor Conferences.