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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Licensing

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

With the release of Dynamics CRM 4.0 Microsoft has significantly changed their licensing model. The following information is a summary of the new facets as we currently understand them.

Server Licenses

There are 3 flavours of Dynamics CRM 4.0 server as follows:

Workgroup Edition – This version is limited to 5 licensed users and is designed to be installed on Small Business Server. There is no multi-tenancy (multiple organization) support in this edition.
Professional Edition – This version is for single organization deployments (i.e. no multi-tenancy) but has unlimited users.
Enterprise Edition – This version includes the multi-tenancy support as well as some features that allow Dynamics CRM to scale better in large deployments such as role-based services and multiple-server instances.

Client Access Licenses (CAL)

The CAL situation has become somewhat more complicated with CRM 4.0. Not only are there the normal variations for per-Device and per-User but there are now 3 flavours of CAL:

CAL – With no decoration to the name, this is the normal read-write client license required by all users of the system who wish to read and write data.
Limited CAL – The “limited” here is meant to imply “read-only”. Whereas in CRM 3.0 read-only users did not require a license, a “limited” CAL is now required. Note that this is in contravention to the statements in Microsoft’s own Dynamics CRM 4.0 Planning Guide which clearly states that a read-only client does not consume a CAL (don’t believe everything you read).
Full-use CAL – Despite the tricky name this is not what you might expect, a normal read-write license, but in fact is an upgrade to a Limited CAL for use when a read-only user needs to write as well.

Careful observation will reveal that a regular CAL is the same price as a Limited CAL + a Full-User CAL, so there is no penalty for starting with a read-only license and migrating to a read-write license at a later time.

External Connector Licenses

Dynamics CRM 3.0 had 2 licensed elements: server and client, but Dynamics CRM 4.0 includes a new element – the external connector. An External Connector is needed when a number of users are going to connect to the CRM system to read or write data by way of another system. 5 Limes is often called upon to created SharePoint widgets and web pages that extract data from or deposit data into Dynamics CRM. In CRM 3.0 we would have used a single CAL to achieve this, but in 4.0 an External Connector license is required. At the time of writing the a read-write External Connector license is roughly 5 times the price of a single read-write CAL and the read-only External Connector is roughly 6.6 times the price of a single read-only CAL. So if you have 5 external users or fewer you are better off licensing them individually, but if you want to connect Dynamics CRM 4.0 to your web site you will need the External Connector.

Server & CAL Packs

There is an option to buy Professional Server and 5 CALs at the same time, but there is really no difference in the price compared with buying them separately (at least there is negligible difference in the RRP).

A note on Action Pack Subscriptions

The version of Dynamics CRM that is made available through the Microsoft Action Pack is the Workgroup Edition. This edition is limited to 5 named users. In CRM 3.0 it was possible to purchase additional CALs when more users needed to access the system but in CRM 4.0 that is no longer possible. So if you are planning to deploy Workgroup Edition (through an Action Pack or otherwise) you should be aware that your 6^th user is going to be expensive.

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Licensing

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

A few pieces of interesting information regarding Microsoft Dynamics licensing that we have recently discovered:

If you have licensed Dynamics CRM 3.0 as part of an Action Pack subscription it is not possible to add more than 10 active users. This is because since the release of CRM 4.0 the FPP (or full packaged product) CAL that was required is no longer available and it is the only kind of CAL that came with a key. No key means no additional licenses.
If you have licensed Dynamics CRM 4.0 as part of an Action Pack subscription be warned you are only entitled to the “Workgroup” edition which has but 5 users. This cannot be extended.

Interestingly since Microsoft deems the “Action Pack” to be a subscription-based license you, as the client, do not actually “own” the license and therefore are not eligible for upgrade pricing either. When you hit the 6^th/10^th user (depending on your version) you will be up for the CRM Server license and as many CALs as you have users, since you cannot use the Action Pack CALs on a box product or volume license. This obviously makes the transition very expensive and while you can at least continue to use your Action Pack SQL Server it seems like this group have not been well catered to in the revised licensing model.

By the way – Action Pack users are generally Microsoft partners – not the group I would have chosen to upset, but then they have more money than me…

[UPDATE - With the recently released Microsoft CRM 4.0 there is all new confusion. See my new post on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Licensing for more info.]

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