Dec 17
Your license for Office Server Search has expired
Earlier this week, a client asked me to assist with an issue they came across when performing a search on their SharePoint portal. The portal was available, content was accessible, yet when they searched, they would receive the following error:
Your license for Office Server Search has expired.
As I began to research the error, I found several ideas but none that manifested in the exact way my issue did. Here is what I found:
1) UAC causing issues with configuration wizard: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/searchserverinstallconfigandadminstration/thread/61e6fec0-f4dd-4473-84d9-2144b67149c8
2) Hotfixes KB 960010 and 960011: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointsearch/thread/96bde6cd-578c-4e72-b81f-af3e9b905415/
3) Another post pointing to re-running the configuration wizard: http://share-point.blogspot.com/2008/04/moss2007-license-has-expired-error.html
Because my environment had SP2 (12.0.0.6421) I wondered if this was a manifestation of the 180-day trial issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/21/attention-important-information-on-service-pack-2.aspx
Sure enough, when I went to Central Administration > Operations > Convert License Type I saw:
To resolve this, you can install KB 971620: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971620
Or, you can fix it manually…
- Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.
- Click the Operations tab.
- Click Convert License Type.
- In the Enter the Product Key text box, type your product identification number, and then click OK.
- The License Synchronizer Job will run on all computers in the farm after a few moments. After all the computers have updated their license from the timer job, the Convert License Type page will reflect the correct license.
Voila!
By the way, the SP2 bits have been updated to resolve this issue.
Hope that helps!