Subscription Renewals

From the 3.4.3 version on, notifications that the license subscription in a D365FO environment is about to expire are sent to all users with the security roles System administrator, Docentric AX Administrator and Docentric AX License Manager.

Docentric AX License Manager is a new role that you can assign users to, which is dedicated to license management operations such as uploading, removing or exporting a license, configuring and receiving license subscription expiration notifications and requesting license subscription renewals.

Subscription expiration notifications

You can see the security roles and the corresponding users which will be receiving the subscription expiration notifications in Docentric AX parameters > Licensing > License notification settings.

Subscription expiration notifications are sent 60, 30, 14, 7, 3, 2, 1 or 0 days before Subscription end date. The notifications are sent also if the subscription has already expired.

Notifications via email

In addition to subscription expiration notifications that will appear Action center in D365FO, you can configure whether email notifications should also be sent or not.

To notify the users that are not necessarily associated with any security role, you can enter their email addresses in the Email recipients field in the License notification settings grid. In this case, only email notifications will be sent.

You can also configure the sender account to be used for sending email notifications using the From field in the License notification settings grid. If not configured, the default email provider email address will be used.

 

Batch job for sending notifications

Sending notifications to Action center and emails to the users configured in License notification settings is done via a batch job with a description Sends periodic notifications that Docentric license subscription is about to expire and the DocLicenseExpirationNotifier class. The batch job will be automatically created when the first user session is created (usually after an upgrade and the D365FO app restart), and it will be executed once a day.

 

You can also change the batch job settings if needed, or turn it off. If the batch job failed to be created for some reason, you can add it manually as described in Microsoft documentation.

The batch job is scheduled to run once per day, but it will create notifications with a warning on Docentric AX license subscription expiration in Action center and send emails out from D365FO if configured so in License notification settings only 60, 30, 14, 7, 3, 2, 1 and 0 days before the subscription expires.

Each time when a notification is created, a new entry in the DocLicenseNotificationHistory is logged. You can open this table in Table browser and check which notifications have been created so far for notification intervals (60, 30, 14, 7, 3, 2, 1, 0 days) and the current license subscription (LicenseSerialNo, LicenseSubscriptionStart).

If an error occurs during creating a notification in Action center or sending an email notification, the batch job will not end up in the Error status. However, its Infolog will contain a warning message. The error details can be found in the DocLicenseNotificationEmailHistory table in the NotificationEmailErrorMsg field.

 

If there are more than 60 days left until Docentric AX subscription expires, no notifications will be created in Action center. Also, Docentric AX subscription expiration notifications are not applicable for the Free Edition license so if you are using Free Edition, you can safely delete the batch job with the description Sends periodic notifications that Docentric license subscription is about to expire or change its status to Withhold.

Batch job for sending notifications replaced with process automation

From 3.4.5 version, we replaced the existing Sends periodic notifications that Docentric license subscription is about to expire batch job with a process automation background process named Docentric license subscription expiration notifier, which results in creating the same batch job(s). The only difference is that both process and batch job cannot be deleted or suspended, only snoozed for 16 hours most.

Request subscription renewals

Users with the Docentric AX Administrator and Docentric AX License Manager roles can request subscription renewal from Docentric AX parameters > Licensing by clicking the Request renewal button.

On the Request subscription renewal dialog please check the renewal subscription period (Subscription > RENEWAL > Subscription start and expiration date), update the data in License entitlements if not accurate (for example, the number of D365FO users has changed), add a note for Docentric team and change Contact emails if needed.

 

By clicking the Send email button, an email with your subscription renewal request and license information will be sent to Docentric team, with Contact emails provided below in the CC field. Docentric team will process the request and send payment instructions to the CC recipients. After payment is done, a new license file will be emailed to the CC recipients.

On the other hand, by clicking the Download email button, an email with the subscription renewal request will be generated and downloaded in the browser. This way you can review it or send it manually using your Outlook app.

After a subscription renewal request is sent to Docentric team, this information will be logged and shown in Docentric AX parameters > Licensing.

What if subscription expires

Expiration of a license subscription has a different effect for subscription-based and perpetual licenses:

  • The expired subscription of a subscription-based license will block all Full Edition features and the product will cease to work.
  • The expired subscription of a perpetual license will not block any Full Edition feature. However, if the product is upgraded to a version released after the subscription expiration date, the product will cease to work.

Learn about license types >>

See also

How to Unlock Full Edition With a License >>
How to Export Docentric AX License >>
How to Remove Full Edition License >>
How to Set Up Docentric AX >>
How to Install Docentric AX via Models >>

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