There’s a new (February 2025) Base and Additive CALs licensing guidance document from Microsoft which is an evolution of the October 2020 Microsoft Server Base and Additive CALS Overview Licensing Brief document. It’s broadly the same information covered, but all the diagrams showing the layered structure of Base and Additive CALs are removed to be replaced with more comprehensive explanations and links to the Product Terms.
Find this new document here: https://bit.ly/4b5Lzn3.
There’s an updated (April 2017) CAL Suites Volume Licensing Brief from Microsoft. There are no significant changes but you can update your collection by getting this latest version from our Licensing Guides emporium.
Find it towards the end of the Application Servers section: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.
EA customers transitioning from Office and a CAL Suite to Office 365 or the Enterprise Mobility Suite need a Bridge CAL, and from 1 August 2015 the Core and Enterprise CAL Suite Bridges are only available as User Subscription Licences.
See pages 14/15 of the August 2015 Product Terms document.
There are two changes to the Enterprise CAL Suite from 1 August 2015.
Firstly, Advanced Threat Analytics is added and is, in fact, added to all the Enterprise CAL Bridges and the Enterprise Mobility Suite too (see page 70 of the August 2015 Product Terms).
Secondly, the System Center Client Management Suite is “removed” – in quotes because the rights to use it will be included in the Enterprise CAL Suite and ECAL Bridge for Office 365 through 31 December, 2016 (page 86).
Due to these changes there are also August 2015 updates to two Volume Licensing Briefs:
Both of these briefs include the amendments noted above along with Skype for Business Server CALs replacing Lync CALs, and the second document has a jolly nice definition of Advanced Threat Analytics if that’s a new product for you.
When are CALs required? There’s a jolly useful article on the Microsoft Volume Licensing blog covering some of the most tricky scenarios. The top 7 questions are considered (clearly the writers don’t suffer from any form of OCD) and include CAL requirements for: multifunction printers, servers themselves, external users, RDS in VDI scenarios, web workloads, accessing another organisation’s servers, and administrators. It’s worth a read at: http://bit.ly/1i7zPkc.
The CAL Decision Tool from Microsoft could help in recommending either User or Device CALs. Even if you don’t use the tool, the questions it’s based on are useful to consider if this is something that’s keeping you awake at night. Worth a look: http://bit.ly/15qjHSc