One of the more annoying parts of being on the beta programs is that our license seems to expire about once a month for one of the betas we’re involved with. It would be nice if your database tracked what products every customer owned and auto-issued a new license (to a designated email) a couple weeks before the current one was set to expire.
In the last couple months we’ve needed a new license:
Today (Waiting for a Draft license to get the Deadline RC1 functional…), December 11, Nov 26, Oct 18, August 1, July 29, and June 4. 
I would also propose that at the risk of losing a couple support sales you factor in anticipated release dates and the customer’s support exp. dates. So if our Deadline Support contracted renews on Sept 20th but the beta is projected to end in January it’s safe to just go ahead and issue a permanent license during the beta. If our experience is typical I can only imagine the support load that the current system places on your sales team to keep everything straight.
Hi Gavin,
Good points. I’m doing some design work for our product licensing, and I’ll include these points in the considerations. For any short-term remedy, I’ll have to defer to others.
One short fix could also be to try and synchronize your expirations. Just looking at my latest file I have one license expiring on the 28th of Feb and another expiring on the 19th of may. If both expired on the 19th of May or the 28th then I would at least only need to have one re-issued. So maybe consider moving to a “quarterly” expiration system where you have a “license expiration day” every quarter (e.g. 19th of May) and then have all of your betas expire simultaneously.
We do have an internal system for tracking renewals that I hammer on from time to time. I’ll see what it would take to add general license expiry in there as well.
Just another thought on this. Could the license system move over to the On-Demand but have “permanent” aka annual On-Demand license types? That way when we renew you just update the database and we don’t have to deal with updating .lic files whenever our license changes?
Hey Gavin,
The on-demand license server system we use has the potential to support perpetual licenses, so this could be a possibility in the future. However, our current focus continues to be on the usage-based system, so we can’t provide an ETA for when this would be supported.
Cheers,
Ryan