Converting SharePoint license trouble

At a customer I was building a demo site to convince the management of the power of SharePoint 2010. The plan was to show some fancy stuff with Visio Graphics Services, Infopath Forms, workflows etc. For this we needed, obviously, the Enterprise license. So I opened CA, browsed to the Manage service applications part to make a new Visio Graphics Service Application… The next image indicated this was not possible. My conclusion was that a Standard license was installed (duh).

But I’m stubborn and looked to the Upgrade and Migration part of CA because I was not sure that the Standard license was used at installation. The Convert License Type page showed me this:

Hmmmm…strange, I thought that the license type should show up here.

So I also looked at Upgrade and Migration > Enable Enterprise Features (see below, first image) and Enable Features on existing sites (below, second image).

The page “Enable features on existing sites” says that the Standard features can be enabled what should indicate that a Standard license is used, but the “Enable Enterprise features” page indicates the opposite. Confused…
So I wanted to know another way to check the license type. My colleague Waldek Mastykarz (http://blog.mastykarz.nl) told me to look into the registry on the SharePoint server at this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration\{90140000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Clicking on the key DigitalProductID indicated the license is a MOSS FIS Enterprise license (see below).

But…this should not be a reason for all the vague licensing information SharePoint shows. So Waldek found a kb article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2143810) about FIS licenses that do not activate all product features. When I executed the PowerShell commandlet for the GUID on the SharePoint server, one of the GUIDs from the kb article showed up. So all this indicated a (more or less) valid license was used, but it was too old.
The client will take further steps and will reinstall the SharePoint Farm with another license.

Tags: license, SP2010

View the original article here