Licensing parents for SharePoint – free parental licensing
I got a question from Mike Herrity yesterday, asking me about the ways that parents can be given access to SharePoint/Learning Gateway, and explicitly whether they needed their own SharePoint licences.
As an aside: Mike Herrity is a deputy head at Twynham School down in Dorset, and is a great SharePoint user. And what I like about Mike is that he’s a prolific sharer – both his SharePoint in Education blog, and his new Netbooks in Education blog are required reading if you’d like to get ideas about what you can do in the future to support your school to build a connected learning community. Mike’s also one of the people I follow from my Twitter account
So back to the question:
“Do I need extra licences for parents to login to SharePoint for online reporting?”
“No”
Obviously, because it’s a licensing question, there’s a bit more to it, but hopefully easy to understand:
If the insitutions students are licensed for their Learning Gateway/SharePoint - eg they have bought Client Access Licences (CALs) - then we automatically extend the rights to the parents/guardians too.
You won’t be surprised to learn that we have a document called “Licensing – Parental Access” that lays all of this out (but perhaps not quite as clearly as above!), and an additional document which customers can download to keep with their licensing records:
Additionally, if a school/college/university has a School/Campus Agreement and have licensed all their students and all of their staff with CALs, then they can also automatically be granted rights for prospective students, alumni & students/staff at collaborating academic or government institutions.
We will update the Education licensing section on the website shortly (but it takes a little longer than popping up this blog post).
Questions?
Add a comment on the blog if you think that others will be interested in the answer, or drop a line to edulic@microsoft.com to get straight through to the education licensing team in the UK.
