Jason Hiegel wrote: Wolf, Here are a couple good resource links to get you started, you company may benifit from working with it's local Microsoft TAM also. http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/ http://mslicense.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/ It's awlays good to get a legit license count and maintain good records. As far as my personal experiance goes with working with MS on corporate audits on Licensing issues in the past, I have never seen them count printers, fax machines, copiers.  That just makes no sense, it would be like MS trying to license you unix workstations or servers.  Never seen it come up in an audit.  Hope this can help you you started Okay I think i found what I need. As almost everybody here has more than one device to access server data (I for instance alone have more than 5 physical devices I use) the user count is the better option. And as I found it explicitly stated, that one user can have several accounts, which are only counted as one user, this gets rather easy. If server access is given to all employees and excutives and additionally to very few external users i need CALs for the number of employees + the number of executives + the number of external users. And those numbers are easily trackable. Anyway thanks. Wolfgang

If I read the papers on Licensing from Microsoft I have the following impression on the meaning of users and devices. Users are the physical human beings, which access the server to use a service provided by the server like file/print/browsing/authentication ..... Devices are the means by which users connect to the server like PCs, notebooks, tablets, phones ... Is this correct? For the users part that would mean that users, which are only used to run services on a PC or the server (service-accounts) do not count as extra users. Further that would mean that e.g. a test-user I create to test a setup before deploying it to the normal (real) users, which is only used by myself does not need an extra license if I already have a license for myself? For the devices this is more complicated. Do network printers, Fax servers and scan servers count as devices? Does - only theoretically, as that's not allowed in my setup - every PC in an Internet cafe, which is used to access the server count as an individual device? Does each virtual machine count as an extra device or are only the physical machines counted? For the user part this meaning would be really very easy to audit in my company as every employee would be a user and there is only a handful of external users, which have to be added to this number. The devices would be far more complicated. Wolfgang

Wolf, Here are a couple good resource links to get you started, you company may benifit from working with it's local Microsoft TAM also. http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/ http://mslicense.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/ It's awlays good to get a legit license count and maintain good records. As far as my personal experiance goes with working with MS on corporate audits on Licensing issues in the past, I have never seen them count printers, fax machines, copiers. That just makes no sense, it would be like MS trying to license you unix workstations or servers. Never seen it come up in an audit. Hope this can help you you started