14 Day Grace Period for Invalidated Licenses in DSP 6.7

Data Stewardship Platform (DSP™) version 6.5 implemented a new licensing scheme that ties a license key to a hardware ID unique to the application server where DSP™ is installed. This scheme was implemented to allow a clearer view of each customer’s DSP landscape, including number of servers running DSP software, each server’s allotted processor cores, and deployment tier. This information enables BackOffice to provide a better experience by ensuring that licenses are issued for all servers needing them and mitigates potential misuse of BackOffice Associates software. Prior to this change, a single license was often installed on multiple servers and even the customer concerned was not always aware of every instance using a given license, which led to problems, including unscheduled downtime, when licenses needed to be replaced or renewed.

Because the hardware ID ties a single license key to a single server, a license key cannot be moved across multiple servers. Hardware changes to the server, including virtual or physical machine reconfiguration, may also cause a license to become invalidated. We typically recommend any machine reconfiguration effort should allow for an expected downtime of up to 2 business days to request and generate a new license key.

In a small number of cases, this has caused unexpected downtime for some of our customers who host the DSP on Virtual Machines or in Cloud environments. Based on customer and consultant feedback, and the desire to minimize any possibility of unscheduled downtime impacting a production server, we are pleased to announce the DSP version 6.7 will provide a 14 day grace period during which an invalidated license will not prevent the DSP from being operational. Each user will receive a notification after successful login, as shown below, alerting them to the remaining days to apply a replacement license.

This change will enable users to continue to work despite virtual or physical machine reconfiguration and will prevent the “Monday Morning Nightmares” that can arise from weekend hardware or platform changes. The new license should be requested as early as possible to avoid any downtime at the end of the grace period.