As with many Microsoft products, the server and CAL licensing model does not physically stop you from going beyond the number of Client Address Licenses you have purchased.
This behavior is by design, and customers are expected to comply with these license terms and purchase additional licenses if required.
As part of the license terms, Microsoft reserves the right, at their expense, to investigate the number of client access licenses in use. To help you ensure compliance, the Named User License Count report should be used.
To print the Named User License Count report, perform the following steps:
- Navigate to System administration | Reports | Licensing | Named User License counts.
- Enter the date as requested by Microsoft (that is, the end of your software renewal).
- Do not check the Show list of users per access license type checkbox, as you won't be able to specify a date that is in the past.
- Click on OK. The system will produce a report similar to the following screenshot:
This is shown at the bottom of the report - please make a note of this, especially while configuring security:
The license count will check all the menu items that the user has access to in order to find the highest access type for each user. Enterprise is the highest and the most expensive access type. Each menu item has two properties for access type depending on whether the user has been given view-only or Maintain (change, add, or delete) access.
The license count will check the highest access each user has (Enterprise, Functional, Task, or Self Service) and report the user count for each of these access types. For this reason, we should be careful while configuring the security roles and assigning roles to the users. It is the functionality they have access to and not the functionality they use that determines the license access type.
Microsoft provides a list of all the standard security roles and their associated access license types. You may find that the built-in roles don't necessarily match your security requirements, requiring you to adjust the roles or create new ones. This is a very powerful feature of AX, but allows us to unknowingly create a role that requires a higher (for example, Enterprise) access license.
The best way to maintain compliance is to regularly print the Named User License Counts report (by navigating to System administration | Reports | Licensing). It may help you to check the Show list of users per access licence type option to get a list of the users assigned to each license type.
You will also notice that Device CALs are not listed separately on this report or on the license information form. These are simply reported because of the role that the device requires, that is, Enterprise, functional, task, or Self Service.