SBS 2003 R2 Premium - CAL requirements?

[BMcCracken]

Hi All,

I'm working with a small non-profit that has SBS 2003 R2 Premium and 10 device CALs. We have 7 PCs that are used in the office by 2 staff and about 10 of the more serious volunteers. We are looking into providing SharePoint Services 2.0 for ALL our volunteers (about 60 total) to store and manage documents. These additional 50 volunteers will never use the PCs in the office and only use SharePoint Services 2.0 from their homes (no more than about 10 volunteers at any one time). My question is: do we need CALs for these additional 50 volunteers?

 

[ForumKB]

As long as you use device cals then you would not need one per user, just one per connected device.

I assume you will just be having the external users access data from sharpoint over the Internet rather than using it to share info etc. in which case these users could use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites, if this is the case you would just need a sungle server license.

More info

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101655351033.aspx

Adrian Paris

Paris Engineering Ltd

http://www.ForumKB.com

Google search of just tech forums & articles
(very useful, honest!)

 

[BMcCracken]

I'm OK with the CAL situation in the office.

Where I'm unsure is with the 50 or so volunteers who will be using SharePoint Services 2.0 from home. The basic functionality of SharePoint Services 2.0 that is part of SBS 2003 is fine for us, we don't need to buy SharePoint Server 2007.

The volunteers will be logging in to SharePoint to access the centrally stored documents for the various committees. Since they are logging in with a username and password, I think they need User CALs to do this. However, they are always connecting via the internet and never logging on via any of the office computers, so I'm not sure.

I'm trying to avoid buying more CALs if possible and I'm worrying that if I need CALs for everyone that I'll soon be pushing the 75 user limit even though the server sees little concurrent activity.

I guess the question I have is: does someone who only accesses the server for SharePoint via the Internet need a User CAL?