SharePoint CAL’s (Client Access License)

I now know how Microsoft makes there money. We just upgraded to SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and we are about to make our site public to our customers. We found that we needed to buy licences to allow our customers use SharePoint.   You can reference this Microsoft page for more information about this: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx.

We found that it will cost about $90 for a standard use of SharePoint and about $70 extra to use the Enterprise Edition (new features from MOSS). That is about $160 per customer! There is one more option which is called an Internet Licence. This allows anyone to use your site, no separate CAL’s required. Sounds too good to be true? It costs $40,000! We have about 40 customers so I don’t think that it would be worth that. I love SharePoint but I am starting to see why open source got popular.

- Kevin C -