SharePoint 2013 Licensing Overview

For people who have been around SharePoint for a long time, one of the dreaded area to have an conversation with your upper management has been about SharePoint Licensing. I can say that IT managers will have few pleasant surprises in store when they try to get their heads around SharePoint 2013 Licensing model.

For starters, here are few key changes in SharePoint 2013 licensing model that will bring smiles on IT Managers faces:
   - No need to buy SharePoint Internet Licenses: You heard it right. The license to host SharePoint for anonymous users and public facing websites that used to cost 40-50k per server is not needed anymore. So, basically if you have the core Server license you can host a public facing website without needing to pay anything extra.  

  - No need to buy CALs for external users: One of the big confusion with extranet scenarios has been whether you need to buy separate CALs for your external users such as vendors, contractors, suppliers, etc who are not typically your employees but may need to access little bit of information or  forms on your SharePoint extranet. Here's the exact words defining who external users are from one of the deck I found from Microsoft on this topic.
       External users means users that are not either your or your affiliates’ employees, or your or your affiliates’ onsite contractors or onsite agents.   

  - Search Consolidation into Core SharePoint License: One of the big change is with respect to Search capabilities. All the search capabilities have been merged into the core SharePoint Server Licenses (Enterprise and Standard), and you don't need to buy a separate FAST license. This, i believe,  has also helped in streamlining the end user's experience with respect to search and data discovery.

I wanted to cover these three main changes with respect to SharePoint 2013 on-premise licensing in this post, but there are other changes being introduced with respect to features and SKUs in SharePoint 2013 on-premise as well as O365 licensing.

Here's an image of the key components in SharePoint 2013 on-premise as well O365 followed by another diagram illustrating the key changes from 2010.



Figure: SharePoint 2013 Licensing Options

      Please note the absence of other add-on licenses such as Internet Site, Search Server, FAST Server, etc.                                        



Figure: SharePoint 2013 Licensing - Key Changes

My goal for this post is to provide an overview of the key changes that I see in SharePoint licensing model, and help people who are trying to get a high level overview of the same. It's purely based on my personal understanding and does not reflect Microsoft's intended vision or my employer's view.  As always, any decision with respect to Licensing should be validated with your Microsoft representative, and is heavily dependent upon your unique requirements. You are responsible for any decision that you make based on above information.   

Let me know if you have any feedback and/or find a flaw with my understanding.
Cheers!!

SharePoint 2010: Classic Mode Vs Claims Based Authentication

One of the setting that you need to pick when creating a web application in SharePoint 2010 is the Authentication type. The two options that you have are:
   1. Claims Based Authentication
   2. Classic Mode Authentication

Authentication in SP 2010 - Classic Mode Vs Claims Based

Classic Mode: This is no different from the traditional AD based authentication. One contraint with classic mode is that you cannot implement "Forms Based Authetication" later on, if you want to.
Although you can convert "classic mode" to "claims based" but will have to use shell script. There is no UI available in  Central Admin to do it.

Claims Based: Claims based authenticaition gives you option to autheticate users using AD as well as Form based authentication for the same web application. It's based on Windows Identity Foundation, and can enable several advanced authentication scenarios as described in this article:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh394901(v=office.14).aspx

Claims based authentication would be the preferred approach for most users. Classic Mode may be selected if mandated by corporate policy or for backward compatibility. Microsoft is also showing more commitment towards broader adoption of Claims based authentication across various product lines (Azure, CRM, etc), and therefore is a better choice for any new development.


 Update (November 2013) :  I was looking at SharePoint 2013 (Preview Version)  and it seems there is no option for users to select Classic Mode Authentication when creating a new Web Application. Although this can change by the product release, it definitely is an indication of the direction that Microsoft is going, which is to encourage Claims based Authentication. 
 

SharePoint and BI : Better Together !!

I feel very motivated by the resposne to this morning's webinar that we did on the BI Capabilities of SharePoint. My intuition is starting to turn into a belief that data analysis and  management is going to gain significant momentum for two key reasons:

    1. Management Pressure: Upper and mid management will continue to be under pressure to show value by cutting cost and increasing efficiency. This in turn will put pressure on IT to evolve their BI strategy to include Self Service BI so as not to get bogged down by increase in demand. Self-service BI will be thier saviour as they will not be able to scale up by hiring more people because of continued cost pressure.

   2. To make sense out of the information explosion: Collaboration features in tools like SharePoint are resulting in an unprecedented level of information explosion. Organizations will be hard pressed to make sense out of all that informantion for multiple reasons, including;
                a. Legal Liability
                b. Getting Pulse of Employees Sentiments
                c. Knowledge Sharing
                d. Data Quality and Accuracy
                e. Many more.

  I believe, SharePoint is uniquely placed to capitalize on this opportunity. I cannot think of a better delivery engine for all this data analysis and mining capablities. I also cannot wait for Denali and Crescent to coem to market with thenext level of coolness.

Here are few slides that I came up with for today's event that maps various Self-Service state that organizations can choose to be in (depending upon their unique requirements), and components from Microsoft BI stack that can enable those requirements.  I have included only the delivery components in the stack, and therefore SSIS, SSAS and other underlying components are missing.
 
** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

The BI Continuum

Capabilities Mapped to target BI Strategy options

Technology Enablers Mapped to Target BI States 

 ** If you need non-watermarked version of these images for non malicious purposes, just drop me a note and I will be glad to send a copy.

   I am tempted to add the coud-Azure dimension to the Microsoft BI story, but that's probably in another post.
Cheers!!