About Overriding the Expiration Date of an Entitlement

FlexNet Operations enables End-User and Producer Portal users to override an entitlement’s configured expiration date with an earlier, user-specified expiration date when the entitlement is mapped to a device as an additional product. This feature allows finer control of license expiration, and makes licenses available for other hosts in a more planned and automated way.

To enable this capability in the End-User and Producer Portals, select the Override license expiration date setting (in the Producer Portal, click System > Configure > FlexNet Operations > Embedded Devices Settings). When it is enabled, both portals display the License expiration date field—in which the user can enter a short-term expiration date—on their Map Entitlements page.

The user-specified expiration date must be later than the current date and earlier than the configured license expiration date. For example:

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If the license is configured to be a permanent license, the user can set the expiration to any date later than the current date.

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If the license is configured with an expiration date such as 31 December 2025, the user can set the expiration to any date later than the current date and before 31 December 2025.

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If the license is configured with a duration-based expiration and a “Use Each Activation Date” start, the start date (license generation date) is the current date.

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If the license is configured with a duration-based expiration and a “Use First Activation Date” start, the start date is the first license generation date. In other words, the current date is the start date if no licenses have been generated for the entitlement on that device yet. However, after licenses have been generated, the actual activation date is the start date.

A user-specified expiration date can be set for each entitlement (however, additional copies of an entitlement are assigned the same user-specified expiration date) and can be different for each host with the same entitlement. After it is set, the date is displayed in the Expiration Date column of the default view for a device or server page of both portals.

Licenses with user-specified expiration dates are automatically removed from a host when that date has passed. An automated process removes licenses with a user-specified expiration date when they expire,

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regardless of other rules about license removal,

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once a day at 10 AM Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)

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and does not require confirmation from the host (in other words, the licenses are returned directly to the pool and are available for other hosts).

Limitations

A user-specified expiration date can be set only in the End-User or Producer Portal interface; it cannot be set in capability requests or Web Services.

Because of the risk for license abuse, the user-specified expiration date cannot be changed. If the wrong user-specified expiration date is entered, it can be changed using standard license removal and entitlement mapping procedures.