I think you misunderstand how CALs work. IANAL. That being said, CALs are either per-user or per-device. They are NOT per-account or per-mailbox. A single user could, for example, have 50 mailboxes and a thousand AD accounts. They still will only need one Windows Server CAL and one Exchange Server CAL (and one Outlook license).
I wouldn't even attempt to authoritatively speak on a hosted environment without testing. My __guess__ is that you'd have to have one account for each user/company combination. However, Outlook 2010 completely simplifies this process. Outlook 2010 allows you to connect to multiple Exchange mailboxes in a single Outlook/MAPI profile. Each mailbox can have an individual identity and they are handled for you. The solution doesn't even require Exchange 2010; just Outlook 2010. You'll have one mailbox per user/company combination. Load'em each up into Outlook. Works fine. Tastes great. Less filling. If you need more information about how CALs work, see http://microsoft.com/licensing. You can also place a telephone call to a Microsoft licensing specialist. You don't have to identify yourself or your company and the call is free (at least in the United States). Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Richard Stovall [mailto:rich...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2010 12:19 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Segregating multiple Exchange e-mail addresses in Outlook (Apologies for the length of this message.) We are a small Exchange 2003 shop with several companies working under the same roof. Several of our employees present themselves publicly as representatives of more than one company. For example, Bob T. Salesrep works for two companies and must keep his outward presentation such that customers of company A only see e-mail from CompanyA.com and customers of Company B only see messages from CompanyB.com. My preference has always been to have separate Outlook profiles for each brand. There is almost zero chance of accidentally sending messages from the wrong e-mail address if there is a hard wall between accounts. Until I read about ExtraOutlook (thanks Ken Schaefer) I always thought that using multiple Outlook profiles meant having only one instance of Outlook open at a time, which is a pain. I have one user who likes using ExtraOutlook, but the others refuse to do so for some reason. A previous admin devised a scheme for using POP via a separate account created in Outlook to retrieve mail for the secondary accounts. This does work in that it collects all the mail into one mailbox and replys are directed from the correct sender. Original e-mails must be sent by choosing the correct account. And to the point. I'm looking at upgrading to Exchange 2010. Obviously each AD account will continue to require a server CAL and an Exchange CAL if we stay with on premise Exchange and the current setup. For those users with multiple identities (that does seem accurate sometimes, btw) this means two CALs of each type. Are there any changes in Exchange/Outlook 2010 that would allow this subset of users to accomplish what they need without requiring multiple CALs? In the past I have created DGs for the secondary accounts and given Send As permission to the users' AD account. This kept the CAL count down, but everyone hated it b/c it was too confusing and did not deal with issues such as replying to incoming mail without manually changing the sender every time the replies needed to go out under the address associated with the DG. The other reason I'm asking is because I'm also considering moving to a hosted solution. It would definitely push us beyond the limit of affordability if two monthly recurring charges were required for each person representing more than one company. Does anyone have any experience with hosted Exchange and a situation similar to this? Thanks for any suggestions or comments, RS
