Sharepoint Trial Expired Issue

 Well, the "SharePoint Trail Expired" issue finally hit my SharePoint. Besides this being total crap (How can a non-Trial edition of software Expire?), what pain in ass! Once again <onto the soapbox> that piece of crap to prevent software pirates from sealing has given a false positive to us that actual have paid for licensing. Having a software bug is one thing, but writing bad software that goes out of its way to disable itself…

 You know, I have yet to see anything that is “Protected” not be broken. Why? It’s simple,  by the very nature of software protection schemes a totally effective protection strategy means that one has to create software that does not work or will not work at some point. I think back to the days of Lotus 123. Mission #1 of Lotus was to make absolutely sure that their product would not work unless you had the Master disc in the drive. Yeah, that was a floppy disc, by the way. Do you see any potential problems with that? Yeap, ever single bad thing that was possible to happen to that Master Floppy Disc did occur… and it occurred on such a vast scale (because Lotus sold tons that their spreadsheet) that Lotus put in place the policy that they would charge licensed customers fees for replacing bad Master Discs. So, when is the last time you heard of anything regarding a Lotus SpreadSheet? Or for that matter Lotus anything? Lotus products do still exist. IBM bought all of that software years ago and some of it is still around (Lotus Notes is used by lots of folks). But a Lotus SpreadSheet? Moral of this story, piss off enough of your customers with your paranoid approach of protecting your software to the point that your software is useless and so expensive and someone will find a way to use something else (ever heard of Excel? Or the other Free SpreadSheet software?).

Ok <off the soapbox>….

 If you do run into the issue of your licensed SharePoint installation Expiring itself, there are a number of good articles on the web to help you through it. In my case, I ran the SharePoint Configuration, without changing anything, and then I did a enable of Enterprise Features in the Operations Admin… and my SharePoint is happy again.

~cse