I work for a very large UK University and am part of a team who is responsible for the network licenses of dozens of software applications serving thousands of clients.\u00a0 Many of these licenses need to be replaced annually.\u00a0 From a technical point of view this is usually fairly trivial but there are various management and administrative considerations that need to be made to ensure that user-side disruption is kept as low as possible.<\/p>\n
Each software vendor has its own process for managing the license renewal process..some of them do it very well and some of them seem to work to make our life as difficult as possible but there is one problem that is shared by many software applications.<\/p>\n
In a misguided attempt to be helpful to the user, many network licensed applications will display a launch-time message if the network license is set to expire ‘soon’ (where ‘soon’ might be as much as 90 days in the future’) .\u00a0 The user sees something like<\/p>\n
‘Your license for this software will expire in X days.\u00a0 Please contact your administrator for more information’<\/strong><\/p>\n Can you guess what happens when several hundred users see that message?\u00a0 Yep, we get snowed under in panic queries for a ‘problem’ that does not exist.\u00a0 The license upgrade is scheduled and will happen behind the scenes without the user ever needing to know anything about it.<\/p>\n So..to all software vendors whose applications do this for network licenses….PLEASE SHUT UP!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I work for a very large UK University and am part of a team who is responsible for the network licenses of dozens of software applications serving thousands of clients.\u00a0 Many of these licenses need to be replaced annually.\u00a0 From a technical point of view this is usually fairly trivial but there are various management […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-applications"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1a8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4472"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4475,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4472\/revisions\/4475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}