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A020103

Windows Licensing and IIS

Licensing within Windows Server 2003 follows the same basic model as previous versions of Microsoft's server products, supporting 'per server' licenses and 'per seat' licenses.

When it comes to IIS, you have to determine how the IIS service will be used and by whom to determine your licensing needs.

If your servers will be serving pages to anonymous users—that is, people who log in to the server using the authenticated systems built into IIS—licensing of users for IIS is not an issue. Sensibly, Microsoft doesn't expect you to buy a license for each public user who connects to your site.

If, however, you require users to log in to system through authenticated methods (using any of the methods that authenticate against Active Directory), you need to have suitable licenses for those users. This will specifically affect companies using IIS for intranet or extranet purposes.


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