Microsoft eases e-mail licensing
C|Net | at | by Mike
Companies will not have to pay as much to keep their e-mail-addicted employees happy under new licensing terms established by Microsoft for the next version of Exchange. Under the new terms, companies will pay a single fee for each person who accesses Exchange information, regardless of how many devices they use to do so. In the past, customers paid for each person and, if they used more than one device extensively, for each additional device as well.
The per-person fee of $67 is on top of a fee for each server on which Exchange is running. Microsoft charges $699 per server for the standard edition and $3,999 for the enterprise edition, which is aimed at companies with more than 5,000 employees. The per-person and per-device license fee is $67. Those fees remain consistent with the current edition of the software, Exchange 2000.