With Windows Server products, you typically have to buy server licensing (SharePoint) and user/device client access licensing (CAL) for each user/device connecting to the server. One could buy each of these CALs one at a time. But there are more efficient ways (accounting and cost) to buy them if you’re using several of those products. You can buy a CAL suite. There is a Core CAL suite that includes Standard edition CALs (e.g. Exchange Standard and SharePoint Standard), and an Enterprise CAL Suite (e.g. Exchange Enterprise and SharePoint Enterprise). They include a bunch of products. From a customer’s point of view, they’re cheaper and easier to account for. From a resellers point of view, there’s potentially more work there if a customer has CALs for unused solutions.
The documents on this site compare and contrast the two suites and the features that they support.
Core CAL Suite:
- Windows Server 2008 R2 CAL
- Exchange Server 2010 Standard CAL
- Lync Server 2010 Standard CAL
- SharePoint Server 2010 Standard CAL
- System Center Configuration Manager 2012 client ML (Interesting that it’s listed as “2012”)
- Forefront Endpoint Protection
Enterprise CAL Suite:
- Everything in the Core CAL Suite
- Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise CAL
- Lync Server 2010 Enterprise CAL
- SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise CAL
- System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 client ML
- System Center Service Manager 2010 client ML
- System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 client ML
- System Center Opalis client ML
- Forefront Protection Suite (Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint, Forefront Security for Office Communications Server, Forefront Online Protection for Exchange(formerly Exchange Hosted Filtering), Forefront Threat Management Gateway Web Protection Service)
- Forefront Unified Access Gateway
- Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services