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This is an updated version (December 2015) of an EES-specific article regarding CAL Suite licensing that is published here.
Core CAL Suite
Since Microsoft introduced changes in August 2015, the Core CAL Suite is equivalent to the following licenses:
It has been announced that from 1st July 2015 the on-premise per-User CAL pricing will increase by 15%.
Microsoft have stated that they have continued investments to support multi-device, cross-platform productivity scenarios which has increased the number of ways in which users access on-premises servers that are licensed with CAL Suites currently.
Customers continue to have the option to license CAL Suites with a choice of per-user or per-device, and per-device CALs will see no change in pricing.
In the Microsoft Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES) Program Guide, the Microsoft formula for calculating the FTE count in the United States is is stated as follows: Full-time Faculty + (Part-time Faculty / 3) + Full-time Staff + (Part-time Staff /2) = FTE Count. It is noted that "Employees such as maintenance, grounds keeping, and cafeteria staff may be excluded from the faculty/staff FTE employee count if they do not use institutional devices." In the UK, the FTE count is made up of Faculty and Staff members where:
Microsoft recently announced changes to the Microsoft Developer Network Academic Alliance (MSDN AA) program as part of a rebranding exercise to DreamSpark.
Licensing for Remote Desktop Services (RDS) can be challenging enough, but under EES there are the added complexities of different price-points for the enterprise-wide FTE count, ‘additional products’ i.e. per-department licensing, and the Student Option - the option to subscribe to software under EES at a lower price point for student-owned or student-exclusive devices.
Very generally speaking we found that Microsoft have priced the desktop platform products (Windows 7 Upgrade, Office 2010, and Core CAL or Enterprise CAL suite) very attractively, e.g. they will be cheaper under EES if you upgrade within 8 years.
Interestingly though, this is not necessarily true for the server products, and using the Windows Server Operating System license as an example, we found that EES is comparable to a perpetual license after 3 years.
The answer is yes - assuming your existing Microsoft Office licenses are not more than two versions behind - Office 2003 is too old! So if you have Office 2007 or Office 2010 (Pro or Pro Plus), then you qualify for purchase of an ‘up to date’ license under EES which is 50% cheaper than normal. For quick reference the SKU number for this is 2FJ-00013 (approx. £8.30/year per FTE) instead of 2FJ-00005 (approx. £17.50/year per FTE). For those with Office 2003 it's not all bad news.
The work at home rights are a little confusing and there's definitely some improvements that could be made in the EES documentation, e.g. in the Microsoft EES FAQ it states:
"For no additional license cost, you can take advantage of faculty and staff Work At Home (WAH) rights for any of the application, system, and CAL products you order for organization use."
With EES you can take advantage of the Home Use Program (HUP), which is a benefit of the Microsoft Software Assurance coverage included with the EES subscription.
It is important to note that with the HUP, only Microsoft Office is available - nothing else. Whereas the Work at Home (WAH) rights allow you to use a variety of applications for work purposes only (including Microsoft Office) - it is only under the Home Use Program that you can use Microsoft Office for non-work purposes.
