Richard Willis – SharePoint Learning Kit Coordinator, SalamanderSoft Owner

SharePoint licensing has always been a bit of a black art, but the release of SharePoint 2010 seems to have complicated it even more. This is my attempt at understanding it and may well be completely wrong! If nothing else it should help your understanding when talking to your Microsoft Education Partner who you buy your licenses from.

Dave Coleman posted a great blog on it at http://www.sharepointedutech.com/2010/05/19/licencing-sharepoint-2010-for-education-in-the-uk/, however on further investigation it has since come to light, and verified by Microsoft that he is missing a component which will in all likelihood double the price.

Basics of Licensing

Forgetting the educational differences to start with, the different types of license which may or may not be required to run SharePoint are:

1. Server License per server running SharePoint
2. Device CAL to allow a specific computer in your intranet to connect to the SharePoint server
3. A User CAL to allow a specific user in your intranet to connect to the SharePoint server
4. A student device CAL for student users
5. A student user CAL for student users
6. A device CAL to allow access to SharePoint from a specific computer/device
7. Office 2010 licenses to use Office Web Applications
8. External Connector License is required if you have an external users (i.e. not part of your organisation) logging into SharePoint. It covers an unlimited number of external users.
9. SQL Server licensing. Every authenticated user must also have a valid license for SQL Server.

The server licenses break down into Standard or Enterprise and then again into intranet or internet options.

• The Enterprise version has more features than the standard one.
• If you want to host an internet site with anonymous users you need the internet option.

For Education

That the basics of SharePoint licensing. Now to consider the educational licensing:

You obviously need a server license per server. I’ll come back to internet or intranet later.

Each SQL Server which is used by SharePoint will need licensing in the normal way. Every user which access SharePoint is will need a license for SQL as well. If you’re using the same SQL server as for other applications, you may well already be covered, otherwise a per-processor license is usually cheaper than individual SQL Server CALs.

Then for each staff member who will be using SharePoint you need a full user CAL (£11.95). So far nothing complicated.

For students it’s where it gets different. For SharePoint 2007, you needed a student user CAL per student. Now if you refer to the licensing for SharePoint Server 2010 at http://www.microsoftvolumelicensing.com/userights/ProductPage.aspx?pid=320 it states

Student Only CALs (Academic Open License and Academic Select)
Student Only CALs are restricted to license student owned PCs or institution owned PCs dedicated to an individual student and are NOT for use in labs or classrooms.

So you will still need a student User CAL(£0.85) per student to cover them accessing SharePoint from home. However in addition to this you will need a full Device CAL (£11.95) for every classroom PC which is not dedicated to an individual student. This is where it could get really expensive. Microsoft estimates that there’s approximately 1 PC per 3.5 students in the UK, so using Dave’s figures of 1000 students, that’s about 285 machines which will cost £3,405.75, which is slightly more than the other licenses put together. Of course if you one of the fortunate schools who has issued on laptop per student you only need student CALS, and if you are on the Schools Agreement the core CAL should cover SharePoint access.

What if you want to use SharePoint to communicate with parents, feeder schools and prospective students? Ray Fleming has blogged on this at Licensing parents for SharePoint – what’s free and what isn’t. Basically for every student which is licensed for SharePoint, then their parents/legal guardians are also licensed for no extra cost. In addition if ALL of your students are licensed then you get a no cost External Connector license for

• Prospective students
• Alumni – student & staff
• Students & staff of collaborating academic institutions or government institutions

You can find out more details about these no cost licenses from Ray’s blog post and download the Parent/Guardian CAL Grant Letter and External Connector Grant Letter. In particular this should mean that you can host sites for your feeder schools with no additional license costs.

What about using SharePoint for my internet sites?

In my reading of the grant letters, they give you:

• CALs for parents
• The above groups of your community rights to log in to SharePoint

My reading of an External Connector License is that it only applies to authenticated/logged in users. So in a strict reading you would be licensed for parents (and your licensed students and staff of course) to access an internet site. You would not be licensed for anyone else to anonymously access an internet facing site as those groups above are only licensed to log on.

Arguably, the intent of Microsoft is to allow all those groups above access to your SharePoint, and you could argue that would include anonymous and logged in access. I don’t have an answer as to whether you are truly licensed for this or not, and neither is anyone I have spoken to, including Microsoft employees! If it doesn’t license you then you will need an internet edition of SharePoint, but if it does, then for the majority of schools their target audience for any anonymous internet web site is going to exactly be those groups above.

Conclusion

The release of SharePoint 2010 has only seemed to muddy the waters even more over SharePoint licensing. I have been told that Microsoft is looking at this area of Educational licensing for SharePoint and feedback is valuable so I would suggest emailing Ray via his blog and letting him know your thoughts.

Sorry about that Ray, but I hope you get lots of feedback!

If you are in education and using SharePoint then the Learning Gateway Conference is the must attend event of the year. Run by Alex Pearce (MVP) and myself it follows on from the highly successful first Learning Gateway Conference last year. This year will be even bigger and better! We have added a whole new track which is dedicated to leading SharePoint schools telling us their stories of how they have implemented their Learning Gateways, what has worked for them and what pitfalls to avoid.

With the recent release of SharePoint 2010, it is an exciting time in the SharePoint world and the educational pricing makes it a great product for use in schools, colleges and local authorities. However, in addition to covering some of the fantastic new features in SharePoint 2010, we will still have lots of content for SharePoint 2007. So whether you have already moved to SharePoint 2010, are planning to upgrade over the summer or don’t currently have any plans to change, there will be lots of great information you can take away and use in your Gateway.

With both technical and user oriented sessions there is something for everybody – network managers, technicians, users, Learning Gateway managers or members of senior leadership teams. In addition the conference will be relevant and useful whether you are an experienced SharePoint user, just starting out or just considering SharePoint. With 3 concurrent tracks running throughout the day it would be worth considering having more than one attendee!

In addition to the content it will of course be a great networking event with the opportunity to meet others in the same situation as you and discuss what you are doing. At only £150 for the day it’s an unrivalled professional development opportunity providing information you will be able to put in practice straight away.

The venue is Church House, Westminster in Central London so is easy to get to from almost anywhere.

For more information visit the conference web site and register today. To whet your appetite here is a list of the sessions:

We hope to see you there on the 14th!

I’ve just added support for uploading multiple files to the My Documents and My Shared Documents web parts. It’s a pretty simple implementation – if you click on Upload Multiple Documents

then you get given the option to upload up to 5 documents at a time.

Nice and simple.

If you are looking to upload more documents than that, then really you probably ought to be using SharePoint itself as the document repository. I always look on these web parts as a step on the way to fully using SharePoint, not as a long-term solution.

However, if you really need to upload many files, just zip them up, upload and unpack them when you are next in school/work.

A question which comes up frequently is how shall we create parent accounts for our VLE or parental engagement system? This discussion is relevant whichever VLE / parental engagement system you are using and whatever your MIS.

There’s 2 main ways of creating parental access accounts:

1. Create one parental access account per student in the MIS.
2. Create an account per contact in the MIS who has parental responsibility for a student.

When schools first start thinking about parental access, then the one parental access account per student is usually the first one which springs to mind. This is certainly the easiest way to initially manage the accounts : you can just take an extract of students from your system and use a similar way of creating the parental accounts as you create your student accounts.

Option 2 initially is harder, because to be blunt, the quality of the contact information in any MIS is generally pretty bad. This ranges from missing information which needs be used in creating the account name, to parents being in the system multiple times.

The reasons for this include:

1. Quirks in the MIS front end make it easier to create new contacts than to find ones linked to siblings and linking them to the current record.
2. Insufficient information in CTF imports to find and link existing contacts.
3. Lack of staff training to find and link exisiting contacts.
4. Until you want to create parental accounts you don’t actually need to collect all the information i.e. Mr Willis is good enough to address letters home with, but not enough information to create uniquely named accounts with.

Hence, before you can begin creating accounts for individual contacts you need to clean your contact information.

So a parental access account per student initially looks very appealing. However, there are several immediate problems with it:

1. Sharing an account between multiple people is just plain wrong. For starters there is no auditing. If the application is purely read-only you might accept this, but if there’s any write back/updating from the account, even something as simple as messaging to the teachers, then this is unacceptable. Imagine what could be done in an acrimonious split in the name of the other party. There probably isn’t any system which is purely read-only, even the ones with just read-only access to information can probably set their display name or has a messaging system.
2. If a parent has multiple children at the school, they will need to login multiple times to see all their children. This is adding extra barriers to use by the parents. We need to make it as easy for them as possible if we want them to engage with the school.
3. Separated couples cannot be allowed to share an account. If they do they may accidentally or maliciously get access to information they should not have. Again in a purely read-only system, if such a beast exists, you might get away with it.
4. If a couple split up and one loses parental responsibility, you will need to revoke the account and issue a new one for the parent who still has parental responsibility. Rather than just revoke the one account.

Point 4 gives rise to an further important consideration. Your parental accounts need constant maintenance, you can’t just create them once and forget about them. You need to monitor the contacts to see if anyone has had their parental access removed or has had a court order raised against them. This needs to be done automatically or pro-actively and not just when someone mentions it to you. Their rights to see the student’s information needs to get removed immediately.

So in my opinion you need to create an account per parental contact in your MIS from the get go.

Once you have created your accounts what do you do with them? Well presumably the SLT has a vision for what they are going to be used for or there’s really no point going down this road. As part of this vision they should have considered about how to distribute the credentials. You could just send them home in a letter, but that’s insecure and not really engaging the parents with what they can do with them. The best ideas that I have seen about this is inviting the parents and their children to sessions at the school where the school explains what they are trying to achieve, how the parents and pupils can best make use of this information and does a quick training session on how to use the parental engagement tools. They are then given their credentials at the session and should know pretty much exactly what they can do and how they can engage with the school.