Enterprise CAL question - need to license a device

[Pho]

Firstly this isn't my area (and I hate licensing) so bear with me.

My company licenses Windows through the Enterprise CAL paying per user. We have a few hundred users each possibly with several devices hence why they chose this route. This is all fine.

A project I'm working on is going to essentially need a kiosk PC - a PC accessible by both employees (already licensed) and non-employees (people from other companies we interface with). All it needs to do is have a web browser loaded and pointed at our (externally hosted) client website to allow them to scan/upload audit documentation.

Our sys admin in concious that as it needs network (DNS, DHCP) access we would have to buy licenses for each potential user as we can't mix/match user/device licenses - this would be very costly and we couldn't estimate the user numbers anyway, it's un-feasable.

So based on this is there any way around it? Seems crazy if not.

Cheers.

 

[Caged]

If it's not on the domain it doesn't need a CAL (to over simplify things). If you do join it to the domain then at least for us in higher ed we license based on full time equivalent users - so two part-time staff equals one CAL. Since this is a kiosk, one extra user CAL will more than cover it.

 

[Pho]

Cheers - I'll mention that.

From what I gather for part-time users you'd have to be using device based CALs to get around having to buy one for each user?

 

[Caged]

It depends what makes the most sense (e.g. cheapest), for shift type work then device CALs makes sense, but when you start having iPads / iPhones connecting via ActiveSync it gets expensive. How we've always been told to calculate it by MS reps is that if we have 3 people who do 3 -ish hours a day each then they can be covered by one user CAL.

It's horribly confusing and I hate Microsoft for doing it. You pay for the client OS, you pay for the server OS. That should be it.

 

[Pho]

It's a complete shame you can't mix and match really: we have user CALs for that very reason (those who have a PC, laptop, phone, etc) but as a manufacturing company we also have shift workers or those who only need to use a PC for a couple of minutes.

The usage we're talking about for externals would probably be less than ~20minutes a day and that person may not come back again for a week. It depends how many sheets of paper they have to scan so hopefully what you say about one CAL is true.

Fortunately this isn't my problem to deal with ultimately .

 

[Caged]

Just ask your rep at whoever handles your licensing, they should be able to answer you the question and point to the relevant document to back their claims up.

 

[Pho]

I think that's what we'll do, just figured I'd check on here to see if there were any ways around it anyone knew of. Cheers .