Hi Experts,
Need some suggestion on licensing.
I believe I understood the complete CAL licencing for AX2012. I’ve a client for whom we need to give the access to some 500 devices which will access very less information from AX. For that reason, we are not interested in buying devices licenses for all 500 devices.
We are thinking of developing a .net application which will access the information from AX, I connect all the devices to that .net application. So, which License that I need to buy to integrate that .net application to AX.
Can I use a Device CAL for the .net application, as I’m assuming warehouse management system which is given in Device CAL example is also a sort of application.
is there any violation of licencing in the way I specified above?
Don’t forget that Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Software License Terms explicitly say the following:
Hardware, software or any other manual mechanism you use to
- pool connections,
- reroute information,
- reduce the number of devices or users that directly or indirectly access or use the software, or
- reduce the number of devices or users the software directly manages,
(sometimes referred to as “multiplexing” or “pooling”), does not reduce the number of licenses you need.
If you don’t want license devices, you can license users.
Hi Martin,
Thank you very much for your reply & also for the pdf you shared.
I’m still confused on how the licensing should happen for software integration. we’ve a software developed which pulls little information from AX database and few users access that data. Importantly, those users wont access the AX application directly and never have been registered as AX users.
Could you throw some light on this please.
What you’re trying to do sounds exactly as something “used to reduce the number of devices or users that directly or indirectly access or use the software”, which "does not reduce the number of licenses you need". The terms sound pretty clear. You want to buy 1 license for 500 devices, which is simply not a model that Microsoft allows.
I don’t think you can reasonably say that your application doesn’t provide direct or indirect access to AX. You would have to find an exception from the terms - I suggest contacting Microsoft and finding an agreement with them.
Maybe you’ll find that the license price is not acceptable for you and you can’t use the approach you wanted. That happens.
Thanks you very much Martin, we are planning to take it to MS. on the other side, I feel as we are buying the licenses for SQL, we have the right to access the data available in sql database without using AX components.
I appreciate your replies regarding the security framework queries which helps everyone to comply with licensing terms :).
If you read data directly from SQL Server database and not using AX application, users don’t need AX CALs. They need SQL Server CALs, though (what I said about multiplexing is valid for SQL Server too, the advantage is that you’ll find many articles explaining that explicitly for SQL Server).