VSTS SKUs

As you might expect one of the first questions that attendees of the devlab here in Redmond had this week was regarding the packaging and pricing of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. Prashant Sridharan answered some of those questions yesterday, assuring us this was not under NDA. Here are the highlights.

There are five different installable packages associated with Team System:

* Visual Studio Team Architect
* Visual Studio Team Developer
* Visual Studio Team Test
* Visual Studio Team Suite
* Visual Studio Team Foundation
* Visual Studio Team Foundation Client

The idea is that when the product releases, subscribers to MSDN Universal will be allowed to choose one of the first three skus and be grandfathered in and given that price in perpetuity. Those who haven't subscribed to MSDN Universal by the time the product releases will have to pony up at a significantly higher price than today. That’s a great incentive to get MSDN Universal before Team System is out. In addition, existing subscribers will be able to purchase the Team Suite for a smaller additional cost. Essentially Team Suite will be separately priced so that if you were going to buy two of the first three products, you’d be better off buying the suite.

The VS Team Foundation is the server portion and will always be sold separately. The licensing for it will be on a CAL model priced something like SQL Server standard edition and is targeted for one install per 500 users. There will also be the option of purchasing the Team Foundation Client which includes the client bits for integration with Excel, MS Project, and the VS shell in which to work with projects.

Visual Studio Team Developer can run in a stand-alone mode not connected to Team Foundation, which is essentially what was available in the beta 1.