SharePoint 2019 Co-authoring License required

Milton Yim 21 Reputation points
2020-12-02T10:38:30.667+00:00

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:

https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/D/4/3D42BDC2-6725-4B29-B75A-A5B04179958B/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?

Microsoft Office Online Server
Microsoft Office Online Server
Microsoft on-premises server product that runs Office Online. Previously known as Office Web Apps Server.
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SharePoint Server Management
SharePoint Server Management
SharePoint Server: A family of Microsoft on-premises document management and storage systems.Management: The act or process of organizing, handling, directing or controlling something.
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Accepted answer
  1. Trevor Seward 11,681 Reputation points
    2020-12-05T00:08:41.47+00:00

    You must have Software Assurance for Office (or M365 Apps (Office desktop) subscription licensing) for each user who co-authors in order to leverage Office Online Server with co-authoring.

    If you don't have SA/subscription to M365 Apps, you cannot use the co-authoring functionality of Office Online Server.

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  1. Itch Sun-MSFT 2,556 Reputation points
    2020-12-03T02:30:02.363+00:00

    Hi @Milton Yim

    The realization of Co-authoring is actually based on the function of auto-save. Some office versions do not support this function, so we cannot use Co-authoring.

    You may indeed need to buy a new office version.

    If you still have questions about this, I suggest you contact Office support staff：

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/home/contact

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