Weblog Henk Hooiveld

SharePoint 2007 Product Activation failed: “The trial period for this product has expired”

Today I had a strange, and rather old, issue with product activation in SharePoint 2007. The situation is as follows: I have a client who has SharePoint farm, which was installed and configured early 2009 (Before SP2!). When Service Pack 2 was released they installed it and soon found out that SP2 accidentally changed the license into a 180 day trial license. Luckily Microsoft came fairly quickly with a hotfix and shortly after releasing the hotfix they release an updated version of Service Pack 2 (See the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog Post on this). My client installed the hotfix, entered the product key again and they thought all was well…..until yesterday.

Yesterday they found out that SharePoint showed the message that the license had expired. So what went wrong? I did some investigation, but essentially found nothing. So in the end I called Microsoft Support this morning. They responded very quickly (Which I REALLY appreciate…Thanks guys!) and together we solved the problem. It appeared that the timer job that is responsible for making all the license changes, the socalled ‘License Synchronizer Job’, somehow got stuck. The strange thing here was that no errors were shown in the Timer Job Status view in the Central Administration, the timer job status for all servers was 100%, no errors in the Wndows Application Event Log and nothing in the SharePoint ULS.

This is what we did to successfully solve our problem:

1. Stop the ‘Windows SharePoint Services Timer’ service on all servers
2. Refresh the Timer Job Cache (On each server, starting with the server that hosts the Central Administration):
1. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Settings\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\{GUID} (In the config directory you will find a directory that has a GUID as the directory’s name.
2. Remove all the xml files from the directory. Be careful not to delete the ‘cache.ini’ file as you need it later!
3. Open the ‘cache.ini’ file and change the number to 1.
4. Save and close the file.
5. Start the ‘Windows SharePoint Services Timer’ service. The xml files should be created again at this stage.
3. Perform step 2 on all remaining servers
4. Re-enter the product key in the Central Administration:
1. Open the Central Administration and navigate to: Operations>Convert License Type.
2. Enter a valid product key, matching your edition (Standard or Enterprise) and click ‘OK’
5. The License Synchronizer Job will execute on all servers in the farm and make the necessary changes.

When you navigate back to the Convert License Type page, you should see that SharePoint now has a valid license.

December 1, 2010 - Posted by henkhooiveld | SharePoint 2007 | Convert License Type, Product Activation, Timer Job