Got into the office this morning and the SharePoint site was running but had an issue with saving, checking-in, and publishing pages.

“The trial period for this product has expired.”

“Options: Exit without saving.”

Which is disconcerting when trying to prepare some new pages that people want to use.

Next step was to check the SharePoint Central Admin site on the server. Hmmm… 503 error….

I then checked IIS site and it was running, but a check of the Application Pool setup showed that the CA app pool was not.

Checked the login and the password was being rejected.

Changed the password for the service account to what I thought it should be (based on a standard structure of passwords for service accounts for SP) and still could not get to the Central Admin.

I was then prompted by a colleague to check what else might be using the old password as it appeared the account was locked out. So I checked and there were 3 services running as well, SharePoint Timer Service which would be polling constantly and locking up the account. Stopping those allowed a password reset to work and then I could get to Central Admin again.

So now to the expired licence and in the Services for the Farm it was clear that the trial had expired which was odd as we have and used an Enterprise licence. But as it unfolded the installation of Service Pack 2 for SharePoint back in April was the culprit as it reset the licences, incorrectly, to a 180 day trial and that expired all over the weekend.

Downloaded the appropriate patch and installed to our staging environment and all worked smoothly. I then tried on the live and got a failure when entering the licence key. The Convert Licence option failed.

Two interesting points were that the Expired message on the edited pages was gone after the patch was installed, but while Central Admin still reported an expired licence. Second the failure message was apparently indicating that becuase I had not restarted the Timer Service (see above) it could not complete. Once I restarted the Timer Service with the correct password Central Admin reported that the licences were now correct. So I guess the application of the licence was successful just not the whole process.

Just as a last observation why are the error logs for SharePoint buried so damn deep in the file structure? In any case

c:program filescommon filesmicrosoft sharedweb server extensions12logs