Licenses

The License dialog accessible from the main menu Help informs about the current product registration status, allows to register a new or updated license (Activate License button) and provides shortcuts to web interfaces where you can make license modifications (purchase renewal, add trial, add users, add modules, purchase another license, observe client activations, Manage License button) or contact sales or technical support department (Request Support button).

License Registration

• On-Line: the Activate License – Online Activation tab – you will need an Order ID of your license (trial or full) at hand – enter the Order ID where indicated – click the Activate License button.

  

• Off-Line: the Activate License – Enter License Offline tab – you will need to obtain the new license from http://shop.icewarp.com/ purchase system, Manage License - License Activation, using your Order ID and the Reference ID displayed in the License dialog – download the license.xml file from the web page or save the email confirmation attachment to disk – click Enter License to browse for the license.xml file – click Open – click OK.

  

License activation may fail for the following reasons:

• The computer is blocked from accessing the Internet or the licenseprocessor.icewarp.com server is temporarily unavailable. Enable port 80 HTTP access on your firewall for config.exe or try again later.
• The Order ID is not valid (the order has not been authorized yet) or it is misspelled. Verify the number, check your order status through Manage License and try again later.
• The license.xml file entered is issued for another computer. Retrieve a new one using the Activate License – Retrieve License option.
• The number of license activations has been exceeded, due to registering the same license on multiple computers (there are 3 attempts to register a license during its lifespan for the purpose of server migration only, provided they do not run in parallel for more than 1 month). Use Request Support to contact Sales.
• The license revalidation process could not be completed neither automatically nor manually after notices sent to the system administrator and the license has been blocked and flagged for abuse.

License Information

The Information section shows license registration details to the left: Name, Company, Email and Street Address. To the right it shows the Reference ID (unique hardware fingerprint), the Order ID (identification of your license in the order database), the Previous Order ID (means that this license is an update/extension of an older license and can only be activated on top of it) and the Status of the license.

The Reference ID shown is specific to the machine where IceWarp Server is installed. It is generated using machine hardware and software information and as such is never the same on two machines. If you migrate IceWarp Server to a new machine, your license will no longer work and you should retrieve a new license (see License Registration).

The license Status can be one of three states:

• OK – the license is fully registered.
• Evaluation – you are running an evaluation license or the revalidation of your full license has failed and the product has entered Emergency Mode (see License Revalidation); the product will eventually expire and stop working.
• Reference ID Mismatch – this occurs when the license is being used on a machine that it was not issued for; in this case you should retrieve a new license (see License Registration) otherwise the services will be stopped after 7 days.

The Read used seats button –

Click the button to refresh the Used seats counter. If you are connecting by a remote console, you need to press the button to count used license seats, while on a local server the values are loaded immediately when you open the License dialog.

The Type column shows the name and category of the IceWarp Server license. There are two categories of licenses: Server and Client.

• Server licenses activate the IceWarp Server (within Administration, see License Registration) and they are Communication/Security/Collaboration features.
• Client licenses activate IceWarp Desktop products (Desktop Client, IceWarp Outlook Sync, from within their respective About dialogs, or automatically using SmartDiscover).
• Client licenses can also activate Mobile features which are managed from IceWarp Server Administration (SyncML, ActiveSync).

The Seats column shows the number of accounts that this license covers at the moment. You can add new system users or activate the corresponding service for additional users up to the amount shown here.

The Renewal Expires column shows the number of days remaining to the expiration of the renewal period (Maintenance).

• If Renewal is positive, it means you can freely install any new version upgrades, update your Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus definitions and request technical support.
• If Renewal is negative, the product will continue to run in the same version for a lifetime, but with limited support and no security updates.
• A service would stop working (each midnight) only if there was a negative number of days for one module AND at the same time, the number would be different for other licensed modules (one service was not upgraded with the rest on purpose and is stopped, not affecting the others).

The Used Seats column shows the number of accounts that have this service active. Only user accounts are counted, as only they are licensed. To list the activated accounts, in the corresponding services General settings – Access Mode – press the List accounts button. You can temporarily activate more users and exceed the amount of available Seats for a limited 14 day evaluation period. Refer to the Automatic Trial Access section for more details.

Red Exclamation Mark is shown next to each license which is exceeding the number of available Seats. Access to the services for users over the limit would be disabled based on this error after a 14-day trial period. Refer to the Automatic Trial Access section for details, and see the Adjusting Used Seats chapter for how to manually adjust the system configuration to the license size.

The Recommended column displays Add Users tip if the number of Used Seats is approaching the number of Seats currently available on the license, or displays Renew License tip if the Renewal Expiration is approaching (the system will also send an informative email to postmaster 14 and 7 days in advance).

Automatic Trial Access

Beside the master Mail Server/Communication license, IceWarp lets you obtain various add-ons licensed for a lower number of users, e.g. for an initial testing before a global roll-out. By default all services are activated for all system users (Access Mode is set to All accounts) which can result in the number of Used Seats exceeding the number of Seats available. Refer to the Adjusting Used Seats section to for details on the Access Mode.

If a service is enabled for the user by the means of Access Mode (the service is check-marked or the All accounts option is used), the licenses are assigned to users who are connecting to the service from the available pool of fully licensed seats, and when no more seats are available, in a time-limited trial, which still makes them able to use that service. This way, administrators can estimate the needed size of the license before it is actually purchased.

Each midnight the system compares the number of trial seats with the number of licensed seats and sends a notification to system administrator, including the list of accounts which are over the limit (using the service in trial mode). Trial period is counted from the date of first access to the service and expires 14 days after, ultimately restricting the user from access to the service. At this point you must either purchase additional seats (the Manage License button) for those users, or adjust the number of active users to the current license size, as follows.

Adjusting Used Seats

• In the service general settings, click Access Mode and select a value other than All accounts, preferably choose Use account/domain options.
• In the Management node, select users/domains from the middle account management tree for which you wish to deactivate this service.
• You can (un)select multiple users/domains using Shift+click and Ctrl+click mouse operations.
• Switch to the Services tab and under Service Access, untick the service you are adjusting.
• A yellow background will appear on the Services Access options, reminding you that you are performing a bulk modification using the template feature.
• Click Save to apply the new settings (or click elsewhere to cancel).
• Verify that the changes took effect in the License dialog.

Alternatively you can use the tool command line utility to make bulk modifications, for example the following command will disable Instant Messaging service on all system accounts, so you can then activate it only for selected accounts as outlined above:

tool modify account *@* U_IM 0

See the IceWarp API – Command Line Tool chapter for more details on the tool usage.

License Backup

You can keep backups or snapshots of your license (applicable only to the same machine)

• using Help – Export License and saving the license.xml file that you can later restore using Activate License – Enter License Off-line
• the license is also saved along with the configuration using the File – Backup Settings menu and restored using File – Restore Settings
• optionally you can include the license in system backups using System – Tools – System Backup – select the Backup the license check box in Options, and then restore it (or the whole system) by opening the backup file with ZIP utility and copying the \config\license.key file from the backup to the new place

License Revalidation

Revalidation is managed by Control service and occurs periodically in time, starting from the Issue date of the license. After a defined revalidation period (approx. 1 month), the service opens a port 80 HTTP connection to http://shop.icewarp.com/license/ and posts the current license identification. It is processed by the licensing server and a new license key is returned and transparently applied.

If the revalidation is unsuccessful, the server retries the on-line revalidation each 1 hour after the previously failed revalidation attempt, and regularly sends an informative email to postmaster account and license holder e-mail address (during standard retry period of 48 hours, administrator will receive the notice after 12, 24, 36 hours).

The responsible person can immediately take action to either allow the outgoing connections and let the license revalidate automatically (takes no more than 1 hour), or use the Activate License – Enter License Off-line option to re-enter a license previously retrieved from the website, using an XML file (Help - Export License...) or their Order ID for the same purpose.

There is a 2 to 7 day (depening on type of license) grace period which defines the maximum allowed time after a failed revalidation during which the server will retry the revalidation. If it is not successful within these 2- 7 days, the license status is changed to Emergency Mode. This is similar to an expired trial – services continue to work, but no settings can be changed.

After 7 more days the Emergency Mode expires, the event is logged into Error log, informative emails are sent to postmaster, license holder and to the product's copyright holder e-mail addresses and ultimately on the next midnight, all services are stopped (and would be stopped each midnight if restarted manually).

Failed revalidation: Due to a problem with connectivity, your hostname [IP] cannot connect to our license server. Please resolve the issue or validate the license via Activate License.

Failed retry: Your hostname [IP] could not revalidate the license with our license server. As a result, your license has been forced into Emergency Mode. Please fix any existing connectivity issue or validate the license manually via Activate License.

If the license is not validated, the services will be discontinued after a short grace period.

Expired Emergency Mode: All attempts to validate the license failed. As a result, the services will be stopped.

SYSTEM [A000] 22:32:07 All attempts to validate the license failed. As a result, the services will be stopped.

SMTP Traffic Limits

SMTP outgoing queue processing is delayed for low user licenses and high traffic, receiving works normally. The mechanism considers amount of incoming and outgoing emails to non-local accounts per day with relation to the number of licensed users. If the number of outgoing connections exceeds a threshold, sending out will be postponed for some time, until the levels balance or 12 AM. The limitation never occurs for 50+ user license, so it typically only occurs for less than 50 user licenses. This prevents using low user licenses as filtering gateways and for large mailing lists.

An event is logged into SMTP log whenever a session is delayed.

SYSTEM [05D4] 19:05:27 Client session Traffic delay applied