A colleague of mine recently blogged about the difficulties of a managing SharePoint environment with a mixture of standard users enterprise. In short, he came to the conclusion that it isn’t a viable solution – a conclusion that I’d whole heartedly support given the grief it causes us both each day. If I had my time over I wouldn’t have attempted it. if you still want to try the mixed environment after you’ve read this post I’d encourage you to have a read of as it will help give you some pointers.

Paul’s post prompted somebody from Unilever to contact him as they’re currently in discussions with Microsoft and were having difficulties getting a simple answer as to the implications of standard vs enterprise. I remember those discussions well and the time I spent trying to find a clear answer online – there isn’t one. This is my attempt to clear the confusion.

Everything below is based on my experience working for a big company with a fair bit of buying power. I don’t know how the numbers will translate to your company or how Microsoft will behave if you get it wrong. With that in mind, do as much research as physically possible because if you get it wrong and Microsoft find out, they’re well within their rights to penalise you.

Server and user licenses

SharePoint is licensed in two parts. The server part is the simplest so lets start there.

Although you can have either an enterprise or standard server, there is no difference in cost (we pay a little under £2’500 + the windows license per server.) The license simple enables a number of features for the farm. You cannot have a mixture of standard and enterprise servers in the same farm. You can upgrade a standard farm but you cannot downgrade an enterprise farm. There is no definitive wording from Microsoft but I’ve seen it argued that if you have an enterprise farm in your company, every single user must have an enterprise Client Access License (see below for more info on CALs.)

Client Access Licenses (CALs)

In order to access a SharePoint site you should be covered under a CAL. Our site gives all of our users access to Windows, Office, Exchange, AD, DNS and SharePoint Standard so if our servers were running the standard license, we’d be fully compliant. As soon as an enterprise feature is enabled on a farm, web application, site collection or site that a user can access, that user requires an enterprise CAL which costs about £45 each. My company has around 80’000 users so in theory, simply turning the farm on meant they could access it (note that they don’t actually have to access it, only be able to) and required us to pay Microsoft £3’600’000 for the CALs.

Now I’ll quickly point out that we didn’t fully understand the implications of enterprise vs standard CALs when we installed SharePoint and ran none compliant for about a year. When we realised the mistake we spoke with Microsoft who were very understanding (I’m guessing it happens a lot.) They entered into an agreement with us where we report on the users accessing enterprise enabled sites and pay for them. Microsoft are under no obligation to agree to this kind of payment model and I doubt they would do it for smaller companies. It’s also worth pointing out that SharePoint doesn’t offer this level of reporting. I had to code an application which scans the farm looking for sites with the enterprise features turned on then grabs the user list and merges it into a spreadsheet. I’d originally planned on using an event receiver to hook when an admin turns features on and kick off some workflow which charged the appropriate business area, but it turns out no event is triggered.

Internet/extranet

If you have an extranet or internet based on SharePoint you’ll need another license called “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites” and if you run a farm with internal and external users you’ll need both licenses. We don’t use SharePoint externally so I don’t have any numbers to offer you. A quick Google shows that the prices appears to be around $40’000

What does enterprise give me

I’m quite critical of the way Microsoft handles standard vs enterprise licenses but to be fair to them, they’re very clear on what each one gives you (assuming you know where to look.) Start here. The short version is that if you want to use Business Data Catalogue(BDC), Forms Services, Excel Services or Report Centre you’re going to have to put your hand in your pocket. Keep in mind that while in most instances your farm admins will have to do some work to enable them, your site admins can still try to use web parts, making their site enterprise. Basically you’d be paying for something that doesn’t work. Clearly education is key here and needs to be embedded firmly into your governance.

Mauro Cardarelli has done a pretty good job of expanding on what enterprise gives you versus standard.