Licensing

Under the new Microsoft pricing policy for Windows NT Server, SQL Server, SNA Server, Systems Management Server and BackOffice (and eventually Exchange), servers and clients are licensed independently.

These two licenses are :

• Server license is the license for each physical server. The server software has unlimited access capabilities (it does not check for a certain number of users ) and the customer will pay the same regardless of whether the server software is going to be installed on an Intel, MIPS, DEC Alpha or any Symmetric multi-processor machine.

• Client Access License is the license per client for access to the service. It is not a fee for the client software since the software necessary to access the service is normally included in the correspondent server package or in the desktop operating system (Windows® for Workgroups and Windows NT Workstation include the client software for Windows NT Server). In other words, the user does not get any client software with the client access license. Rather, the user gets the right to use the server software.

This model has a number of advantages, including:

1. It greatly simplifies license administration in a complex network environment. Previous licensing schemes varied by product, and did not scale evenly to various numbers of clients and servers.

2. It allows administrators to purchase only those licenses they need, to adjust these flexibly, and to combine licenses when appropriate to achieve (through product licenses such as Microsoft BackOffice) even greater savings.

3. Once a client is licensed, it can access any and all servers on the network without additional charges

4. It is cost effective to add additional servers because there is no need to re-license user capacity. Implementing the second (or third, or fourth) client-server application becomes extremely cost-effective; the only software cost becomes the cost of the server