I have been getting asked more and more lately about how to license OCS Web Conferencing (on-premise) and the Office Live Meeting (hosted service) for organizations. I’m sure this has a lot to do with the economy and budgets being reduced and expenses being more controlled for travel training.

So, let’s start out by saying that the licensing options for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 and Office Live Meeting are not very clear at first glance. today I took about 45 minutes to do some digging to get all this figured out. So here is what it comes down to:

You can host your own web conferences using OCS for both internal and external participants. If you want to use OCS you need to buy the appropriate OCS Server License and both the OCS Standard CAL and OCS Enterprise CAL (User or Device based) for every internal person or device that will be participating in a Web Conference – presenter and participant. External users do not need to have a CAL to join into a OCS Web Conference.

Office Live Meeting is a hosted service that has two subscription options: 1) Standard User and 2) Professional User. Just like OCS, every internal person who will be participating in a Live Meeting – presenter and participant – will need a subscription license. External users do not need to have a subscription to join into a Live Meeting.

So both solutions require that any internal person that will be using the service – presenter and participant – be licensed. The best analogy I could think of was the licensing model that Exchange uses. It may help to think of OCS and Office Live Meeting in the same way. For example, each internal Exchange User or Device needs an Exchange CAL to use the service. External users who receive and send Email to/from your organization do not need CALs (or an External Connector License) to communicate with you.

Keep in mind that the above guidelines apply to the Audio/Video/Web Conferencing portion of OCS only. If you want to enable different features of OCS, there may be different license requirements. For example, if you want to connect OCS Instant Messaging to a Public IM Service – AOL, Yahoo, Live Messenger – it does require a PIC subscription in addition to the OCS Standard CAL. So make sure that you talk to Microsoft Licensing expert or do the research yourself.

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