My organization is a government department.
We purchased the following license to upgrade and migrate our existing SP2010 on-premise to SP2019 on-premise:
SharePointSvr 2019 OLP NL Gov
SharePointStdCAL 2019 OLP NL Gov UsrCal
SQLSvrStdCore 2019 OLP 2Lic NL Gov CoreLic Qlfd
Last year we have prepared enough budget to acquire all Microsoft License in order to complete the upgrade.
Today we received a msg from local Microsoft office, reminding us that to use co-authoring feature with editing function, we should also purchase "Office Standard/Professional Plus with Active SA or M365 Apps"
and also attached the following license guide:
Licensing_Microsoft_Office_Software.pdf
We already purchased and using Office Professional Plus 2016 for gov. This is pretty shocking because we never hear that we also need to acquire the office license with SA, to meet this requirement it seems we need to purchase the full Office license again but with SA. This license total cost is totally out of our budget as we have more than a thousands of users....
Please help! Mainly i need answers for the following questions:
1.the above licensing guide title is for "Commercial", does this also apply to us, government department too?
2.why do we need to purchase Office license with SA? why normal Office license can't do co-authoring?
3.Do I really need to purchase all Office license again in order just to use one co-authoring editing document feature in SharePoint 2019 on-premise?