license Archives - Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure

Activating a Windows Server 2012 R2 evaluation installation with an MSDN license

If you’re running an evaluation version of Windows Server 2012 R2 and want to activate it with an MSDN license, you may find that you get an error like this:

“Error: 0xC004F069 On a computer running Microsoft Windows non-core edition, run ‘slui.exe 0x2a 0xC004F069’ to display the error text”

Running that slui.exe command doesn’t get you very far though. It basically tells you the same thing about struggling with the edition. Off to my favourite search engine I went, but I found surprisingly little about this. I had vague recollections that this may not be possible, but the best information I found was this Blain Barton post on converting evaluation editions. Unfortunately, it didn’t mention anything about MSDN licenses, and in principle my edition wasn’t changing, so I didn’t really know what to do for the Set-Edition parameter that he speaks to in:

DISM /online /Set-Edition:<edition ID> /ProductKey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX /AcceptEula.

Poking around a bit more I found the DISM TechNet reference and the DISM.exe /Online /Get-TargetEditions command.

That revealed an option for “ServerStandard”. So I ran the command with “ServerStandard” and it worked, as follows.

DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerStandard /ProductKey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX /AcceptEula

One other thing I found confusing is that if you run DISM /online /Get-CurrentEdition, there is a “Current edition is” and a “Current Edition” parameter in the response.

Only “Current Edition” had a value for me: “ServerStandard”. I’m including this tidbit to clarify that the empty value for “Current edition is” doesn’t seem to have any relevance here.

Yay. Hope this helps someone. Note: to commit this change your machine will need to reboot (twice I think).

RMS Use Licenses, Offline Access and Rights Revocation with SharePoint 2010

After a brief diversion, I’m returning to my series on SharePoint with RMS. This post finishes off the baseline considerations, although there’s a lot more to say. But at last, in this post, we’ve reached the point where we know that RMS thinks I’m cool – so now what? Or if you prefer, I’m taking a look at the RMS Use License that is typically embedded in Microsoft Office documents, or in other cases might be associated with a client’s machine.

The Use License that RMS issues acts like an offline enforcer of allowed rights. The rights granted by RMS and the duration they persist define what a user can do with their offline copy of RMS-protected content and how long they can continue to take those actions before they need to re-visit SharePoint and the RMS infrastructure in order to claim fresh rights. Since rights persistence is defined by the owner(s) of a SharePoint list, the impact of those settings should be well understood by any users that have this control.This post focuses on what a user can do offline once RMS has done its job, and the user’s experience once those rights expire, bringing the tension between valid offline access versus timely rights revocation to the fore.

You will notice I’m talking about offline access a lot here. When I say “offline” in reference to RMS-protected content, I mean the documents that have already been encrypted by RMS and decrypted/opened by a user. I say the files are offline because the original unencrypted content still resides in the SharePoint content database. Any edits that RMS allows a user to make to the offline content need to be saved back to SharePoint if they will persist over time. Continue reading “RMS Use Licenses, Offline Access and Rights Revocation with SharePoint 2010”

180 days is approaching

It’s now nearly 180 days since the MOSS 2007 SP2 product expiration problem was discovered. Any systems that are running with the original version of SP2 will expire 180 days after it was installed. There are some quite simple solutions to this problem, but it’s worth assessing the state of your systems to make sure they aren’t at risk.

If the original version of SP2 has been installed on any systems, this can be fixed by re-entering the original product key or by applying this hotfix. If the service pack installer was downloaded after 29/7/09, this fix is included. Any questions should be answered by the original post’s Q&A.