Sharepoint site backup license query

[adamfindlay]

Hello, I'm looking for some clarification with regards to licensing requirements to back up a SharePoint site. I understand that you require a license for every user who has access to the backed up SharePoint site?

I have configured a test job to back up the SharePoint site in the hope that I could then look at the license usage and it would tell me how many licenses are required however after doing this the license usage is coming out at 0.

I have read on another post that if the personal data of users that are able to access the backed up SharePoint site is not protected they will not increase the license count and I this clarifies what I am seeing with my test.

What is the correct process for making sure you are compliant in this situation is it up to me via other means to establish how many users can access the site and order that number of licenses like an honors based licensing model if the system isn't counting for me?

It has got me thinking though this specific site in question although its a small one can be accessed by the whole organisation so do I need licenses for the whole organisation? even though everybody in theory has access to it but in reality only a small subset of the total users have actually ever accessed it? If I need to license every user that can access it even though they never have that seems totally daft to me and would also completely price the solution out of the water. The whole model to be honest doesn't seem very well thought out since backing up a 10mb sharepoint site containing 1 or 2 documents that 1000 users may have access to would cost over £600 per month by my calculations which clearly is ridiculous.

thanks

Adam

[Mike Resseler]

Hey Adam,

We don't verify this in the product. Technically it is possible (everything is possible in software) but it would take a lot of calculation and queries to the MSFT service which would come at a high performance cost (and many more API calls).

However, imagine you are protecting 1000 users already (email / onedrive...) and you are going to protect SharePoint sites, you don't need to count additional licenses for those 1000 users. Once you assigned a license to a user, that license counts for his email / onedrive / sites he/she has access to and teams he/she has access to.

Hope it helps
Brgds,
Mike

[adamfindlay]

Hi Mike, thanks for coming back to me and understand where your coming from on the technical side of things.

In my scenario its the other way around though I have a customer who has a requirement to back up 1 SharePoint site but doesn't currently back up all of their user mailboxes and data. What can we do in this situation as the licensing model you describe doesn't fit that way around. Cant we not just license it on a per SharePoint site basis?

thanks

Adam

[adamfindlay]

Hi, Just wondering if there is any update on this or if anyone else has any ideas.

Thanks

Adam