Issue No. 35June 2015
Microsoft Raising user Client Access Licenses 13% on August 1, 2015
Microsoft is planning to increase the cost of user Client Access Licenses (CALs) for premises-based server deployments by 13 percent, starting on August 1. A Microsoft Client Access License (CAL) legally permits client computers or users to connect to Microsoft server software. Microsoft products that will be affected by the 13% price increase on CALs include Windows Server, Exchange Server, Lync Server and others.
A Client Access License is sold with a Microsoft server product. For example, when a company buys a new copy of Microsoft Server 2012, licenses are required for the server product as well as CALs for the associated end-users who will be accessing that server. In our example, a company upgrades to Windows Server 2012 who has 60 employees accessing that server. They would purchase 1 copy of Windows Server 2012 and 60 Windows Server CAL’s for the employee users.
Microsoft is not changing anything fundamental about server and client licenses, only the specific cost of these licenses. We wanted to make our clients and partners aware of the price increase with Microsoft user CALs as this is the largest price increase that Microsoft has had in some time. For the majority of businesses, this means that Microsoft server licensing for your business will be more expensive after August 1st 2015.
To learn more about Microsoft CAL’s and how these changes may affect your business please, Contact Us.
Power Map for Microsoft Excel Updates in Microsoft Office 365
In May Microsoft introduced a new core feature to Power Map in Microsoft Excel: Custom Regions. The Custom Regions feature allows data to be mapped to the regions that matter most to you, even if they are not the traditional zip code, county, state or country regions. Custom regions are useful for scenarios involving sales districts, school districts, congressional districts, land lot development, crop rotation, geological analysis, and anything else using custom-defined polygons.
The Custom Regions feature in Power Map allows you to import KML or SHP files which contain custom polygons. Once imported, you can use custom regions in the same manner as you would use standard regions such as zip codes.
KML files can be created with a variety of free tools which are available on the Internet, you can read more about them here. We also support the import of SHP files, you can read more about the SHP file format here. Note that for SHP files we only support the WGS 84 standard coordinate system projection, more info here.
To learn more about Microsoft Office 365 and its features, please contact us!
