I manually renewed my subscription primary license today which was 16 days before it was due to expire.  I have my forms and LF Servers setup to get the license updates.  How can I verify that they did?  I don't want to have them stop working on the prior expiration date due to them not getting a new license.

Hmm, I don't think we have a good informational success message at this time.

I'll take that back to the team, since it's a gap in the "no manual maintenance" aspect to have to manually check the file.

For now, you can look at the actual license files and check the expiration date.

Make a copy of the file, then change the extension of the copy to .xml to open it more easily. If you have trouble reading it, you can use a "pretty print" tool for XML, either online (there are many) or with an application like Visual Studio or Notepad++

The Laserfiche Admin Console will display the server's expiration date in the right pane when you select the server name.

Miruna - I checked the Admin Console and it is still showing the previous expiration date.  The LF.LICX file shows the new expiration date.

Oh wow! Renewing a license requires clicking the hyperlink "Send relicensing notifications" or everything goes down one day in the future. How in the world are we meant to know this? When adding this type of change which could pull primary services down, please make the interface more intuitive.

Clicking that link is an optional manual override to improve the old previous process of manual relicensing, not a required step for expiring systems.

When configured according to the documentation, administrators of subscription systems should not have to take any manual actions to ensure Forms and LF Server renew.

To put this in the context of the original post, Blake asked what the point of leaving the feature exposed was: it's a side benefit of the bigger goal (automating subscription renewal) that admins in non-subscription systems can use it to reduce manual relicensing steps.

If you are having to manually click the link for a subscription system, please

1. Review the documentation to make sure you have correctly configured the automatic renewal
2. Verify that the system is on the latest available version.
   1. In older versions of the product, more manual steps are required
   2. There was a bug, which has been patched, that caused the primary license renewal to fail (and thus the applications were also not notified)
      1. see KB1014288 for details and links to patches

Our next update includes UI improvements for this functionality, such as autoconfiguring the link from the machine name when we can (for Forms), adding more context within the LFDS admin UI, and direct links to the help files.

Note: the system expiration mentioned was not caused by the addition of this LFDS feature; subscription system expiration behavior remains largely unchanged since subscription users were released in 2017, when renewal was entirely manual. Rather, the feature was added to reduce the chances of the system going down by automating previously manual steps, and we will continue to iterate on this user experience.

The server is configured per the documentation, the confusion here was we manually renewed, instead of allowing it to renew automatically. I was actually asked to manually renew a month before the renewal date due to the auto renewal failing last year (which should be fixed now since they are on version 11).

So essentially the manual renewal process is more confusing then that auto renewal, since with auto renew there is no need to click the extra hyperlink, but it seems if you manually renew and do not click this hyperlink, the system will be set to go down on renewal date (since it doesn't auto renew if you manually renew)

Thank you for the additional context. 

With manual renewal of the primary license, there still should be no need to click that link: the application notifications are triggered by any primary license renewal, not by the autorenewal specifically.

We'll see if we can reproduce, since what you described is not the expected behavior.

Was this the Laserfiche Server, a Forms server, or both that did not update its license?

Both Laserfiche Server and Forms Server required the lf.licx to be replaced manually, all running version 11, so very up to date.

We ran the manual renewal on 7/22, a month before the 8/21 expiration, once expiration came around LFS and Forms shut down.

The other licenses were not effected, Web Access, Audit Trail, Import Agent.

Got it. I asked the team to look into it and so far we cannot reproduce. I'll let you know if that changes.

Do you recall the notification timing settings?

This is under general settings. (I do have a work item for updating the LFDS documentation since it's pretty sparse at the moment)

My best guess since we don't see a bug is that it was set to send too far in the future to help. We might need to change our default setting for the timing.

And just so I'm not assuming: they did update when you clicked the "Send relicensing notifications" link?

It was set to Send notification immediately. My guess is that this only applies to when Send relicensing notifications is clicked.

No, that setting applies regardless. It's hard to tell what might have gone wrong if it only happened for one customer. 

We were unable to reproduce the issue you described after a variety of tests; if you see this again, a support case would help so we can look more immediately at settings etc. to determine where the issue might lie.