Tom Rizzo's SharePoint Blog

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Hello Tom,

If an Intranet and Extranet is hosted on the same server (or farm) you need to create user accounts for external users in your corporate Active Directory. Is it allowed to host user accounts for external users (not on the companies payrol) in a corporate Active Directory?

If this is not allowed you have to host the accounts for external users in a SQL databases and authenticate to that or setup a seperate Active Directory and configure a one-way trust.

Hi Tom,

if I only have anonymous users to my MOSS 2007 based internet site, do I still need MOSSFIS or can I just license MOSS 2007 Standard or Enterprise?

Hello,

This is good news (I think!). But please do update the FAQ you linked to. I'll quote from it directly (as it appears 2007-09-24):

--

Can I mix SharePoint editions in the same farm?

Within a farm, Office SharePoint Servers must be same the edition. For example, you cannot have a single farm consisting of Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers along with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites.

--

From what you're saying, the answer to the question I just quoted above has completely changed.

Vincent, you can put external folks in your AD.  You will need to either buy client access licenses for those external users or buy the External Connector for Windows.  If you look at the licensing FAQ on our site, we talk about licensing Windows Server and SQL for different SharePoint environments.  Sometimes licensing seems more complex than the technology :)

Frank, MOSS licensing doesn't differentiate on anonymous versus authenticated so you would need MOSSFIS for your Internet site.  Now, you can buy client access licenses for named users outside your org but for an Internet site, you probably will go with MOSSFIS since its unnamed users.

Peter, the FAQ website should be updated today or tomorrow so keep looking for that change.  Plus, any other comments or suggestions on how we can improve the FAQ, I'd love to hear.  We tried to distill the most common scenarios in it but we don't always get them all.

Body: Was asked another curly question about Licensing on Friday, and was reading this during my daily

Hi Tom,

Thanks for this. I was previously unaware of MOSSFIS - is this actually a separate version of MOSS, in addition to Standard/Enterprise?

If so, was it legal (before this change) to use Enterprise for publishing to the internet, so long as you were not also publishing internally?

I have a client who is due to go live fairly soon with an internet-facing MOSS site, with Enterprise edition. There will be two web apps, one using FBA for internet users, and one using Windows Auth. The latter will purely be used for administrative purposes. Can you let me know what licensing arrangements you would recommend for this?

Thanks,

Poolio

Poolio, if you're using SharePoint for Internet facing applications, you need to get MOSSFIS.  The internal folks do not need MOSS CALs as long as they are just working with SharePoint for the externally facing site.  If they are using MOSS for both external and internal, then they will need CALs in addition to MOSS Server licenses and MOSSFIS.  Hope this helps!

Thanks Tom. It does help... but has got me a little worried! MOSS was installed long before I arrived on the project, and I don't believe MOSSFIS licenses have been aqcuired - is there any way to determine this?

Also, are MOSSFIS licenses necessary *in addition* to Enterprise, or instead of? And will a reinstall be required to activate MOSSFIS?

Many thanks for your help on this!

Poolio

Sorry I should also say, the internet consumers of the web applications will be using FBA, not anonymous access... does that still count as internet, or is that extranet and therefore covered by Enterprise??

Thanks!

AFAIK you'll need to buy MOSSFIS, as soon as you use MOSS for public websites (internet). MOSSFIS does not require CALs as you get unlimited user access with MOSSFIS - please not, that it is very expensive and don't forget about licensing your SQL-Server.

As far as mixing Enterprise and Standard is concerned, there is a lot of confusion. If you ask MS the usually say, you can't mix, which does not make sense in my opinion.  Let's say you have 300 users within a company of which twenty need access to Business data. According to MS because of these 20 you'd have to buy Enterprise for all users, id est 300. Although you actually buy CAL's, there is now way you can manage these CAL's in Sharepoint as it is not attached to any user. Practically you could buy one CAL and serve a thousand users!

At the moment we are discussing this issue with MS and the last thing I've heard from our licensing department is, that there might be a possibility to mix the different flavors of CALs, but I haven't seen that on an official agreement yet.

So there goes the money.

Cheers

Cédric

Tom,

I am looking to purchase MOSS Standard and Office Forms Server and use it for both Intranet and Extranet sites - I want to create portal sites for certain customers and suppliers of ours, NOT a publicly viewable internet site.

Do I still need to purchase MOSSFIS in addition to MOSS Standard licence to do this? And can I do this with Standard or do I need Enterprise?

Finally if I get Forms Server, do end users on the extranet portal sites need CALs just to fill out an Infopath form?

Many Thanks

Sam

Hi Tom,

If my org. has 200 employees who will access MOSS but at any point of time max. 25 users will be accessing MOSS then should we buy 200 CALs or just 25 CALs?

Thanks!

Hi Tom

Thanks for your reply, which has clarified the forms server issue. Just have a couple more questions. If I buy MOSSFIS and use it for extranet sites - how many sites am I allowed to create? I plan to create a separate site for each of our customers and each of our suppliers. Can I do this in MOSSFIS? Presumably it would be a bit like creating subsites within a site collection on the normal SharePoint (internal version).

And also, how would I go about authenticating external users who access the extranet sites? Is this possible via AD? (and if so does that mean a Windows Server 2003 CAL for every external user I plan on allowing access to the system?)

Thanks in advance

Sam

Hi Tom

I'm working with a client who has MCMS 2002 running an intranet site for 15,000+ employees with average daily usage of 1,900 users and unfortunately they didn't have software assurance.  The dilemma they now face is they would like to migrate to the MOSS WCM stack but the cost is quite prohibitive.  Is there any plans to provide more licensing options for this scenario, I've notice other people raising similar issues.

Joe, shoot me an email and let's chat offline.  I'll hook you up with the right folks and we'll see what we can do.

Hi Tom, currently we have around 3 internal sharepoint sites and requests have been made to create more. There are about 15 users who access these sites, what is required from a lincensing point of view? Also if anonymous access was allowed to the sites then what would that mean as far as licensing is concerned?

Thanks

Could you make it more complicated please?

I have 5,000 employees and 10,000 external partners. I want one farm. I'm planning 2 MOSS servers inside with 5,000 CALS and 2 MOSSFIS servers external, single SQL Server inside with proc based licensing. Is this a viable config. Is mixing licenses in a single farm OK now? I'm planning on FBA outside. When do I need the Windows external connector?

Tom, that licensing FAQ is a disaster.  It looks like it was edited with an automated spell-checker by a teenager and it should be fixed immediately by an adult.  It is littered with spelling errors, grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes that make it very difficult to understand - the licensing language is complicated enough without all the errata.  I'm trying to make sense of it all and it's just making my head hurt.

Tom,

Can you please advise if there are any such clauses associated with using WSS as well. We plan to develop a site using WSS and have an existing MOSS server licence for inranet. Can we host the newly developed site (in WSS) on this server for Extranet users?

Thanks

GG

GG, for WSS use on the Internet/Extranet with external parties, you only need to buy a Windows Server External Connector if you are allowing authenticated access to Windows Server/WSS.  If it's all anonymous, you just need a Windows Server license.

Hope that helps!

Tom

Tom, we are looking at building a redundant SharePoint Internet Solution (2 web servers, 2 app servers, 2 db servers).  Would we need to buy a MOSSFIS license for just the two web servers or for the 2 app servers as well.  I'm assuming we would just need the sql licenses for the db servers.  Thanks.