Use rights for on-premises of SharePoint, Exchange and Skype for business - when you have Office 365 user licenses

This topic has been covered before (here and here), but I was recently in a conversation where this was brought up, so thought I’d do a short refresh.

To sum it up quickly; you need to purchase server licenses for your products, but depending on the Office 365 licenses you have, they cover on-premises usage rights for your employees, so no need to purchase duplicate CAL’s.

It’s all listed in the Product Terms document which you can download from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product-licensing/products.aspx. The document covers use rights for other products as well and is the go-to guide on licensing.

In the latest version dated June 1st, 2017 a fair bit down in the SharePoint section you see that SharePoint Online Plan 1 cover standard licenses and Plan 2 cover enterprise features of SharePoint 2016 on-premises. This means, you still need to purchase the appropriate server licenses, but if you have Office 365 E1-E5 licenses, you are covered on the user licenses – as E1-E5 cover SharePoint Online Plans. E1 only covers base or standard SharePoint features (see table at the end).

You can find the same information in the document for licenses regarding Exchange and Skype for business. There’s also a note pointing to Appendix A which puts it all in a nice table, and I’ve highlighted the ones for SharePoint use right as an example. The top row lists all the different licenses you can have for users, and the blue squares show where they apply as valid on-premises licenses.

The Base entry is standard functionality, and the additive is for enterprise functions.

This means that if you have an Office 365 E1 license, you can use SharePoint Standard functionality, while E3, E4 and E5 give you usage rights to Enterprise features as well like enterprise search, e-discoery, InfoPath services etc, all listed in 3.2.1 in the first image.

Using ExcelREST to display charts (if you don’t have Enterprise license)

If you have the Enterprise version of SharePoint you may use the Excel Access Web Part to display charts on your pages. If you don’t have Enterprise license, but have Office Web Apps installed, you can use Excel REST. This should work both for SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint On-line.

It all started with a customer who had SP Standard license but wanted charts on their pages, and I’m very clear to customers that I am not coding charts in ASP.NET or using JavaScript. They can most of the time create much better looking charts in Excel.

Research led me to creating a web part, much similar to the Excel Access Web Part, but also a bit improved. My next thought was to create this as an SharePoint App, but due to several factors of the App model, that project is now on ice and cannot be completed due to the lack of API’s.

Long story short, I’ve taken the code I have and made it into a sandboxed solution located at https://spexcelchart.codeplex.com/. It’s tested with 2013 on-premises and SPO, but should be easy to compile it for 2010 if you want.

Enjoy!

Know your SharePoint version

This post is not so technical, but relates to the business side of SharePoint. I’m doing a project with a customer with FAST Search for SharePoint. The company has 3000 employees and were told they could use FS4SP with the Standard version of SharePoint, meaning the standard CAL’s. I mentioned in a meeting some weeks ago that I was 99% sure this was not possible, and that you need the Enterprise license in order to use FS4SP.

Starting the install today showed I was right. Standard version does not have the FAST options for a Search Service Application. Adding in an Enterprice serial number enabled all the good pieces.

But, for 3000 users, going from standard to enterprise will cost you. Using ballpark figures from http://www.sharepointconfig.com/2010/05/indicative-sharepoint-2010-licencing-costs/ where a standard CAL is ~£60 and eCal is £60+£53=£113, we are talking forking out £339,000 instead of £180,000, a whopping 88% increase. And to top it off, we are talking an off-shore company where there are 3 shifts during a 24h period, and people work 2 weeks, and are off for 4 weeks, so the number of licenses in use at one time will never be more than around 350.

At times like this I’m happy to be a tech and not a buyer

MSDN Partner Benefits for Visual Studio 2010

[Update - link to the VS2010 and MSDN licensing white paper]

The company I work for is a Microsoft Gold Partner with and MSDN subscription, and this includes licenses for the new Visual Studio 2010 released yesterday. As I’ve been singled out to administer Microsoft licenses I dived into the Microsoft Partner site to figure out what licenses we are entitled to use regarding Visual Studio 2010.