What Can Happen When You Try to Convert a Standard SharePoint 2010 Farm to Enterprise

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I was investigating on what exactly are the differences between a SharePoint farm with Standard CAL and Enterprise CAL. And even more, with/without Office Web Apps. So first I got my single server installation built, with Office Web Apps, and took several screenshots. Then I go ahead to input my Enterprise key in Convert License Type page.

What? The input control is disabled? Current License shows I have SharePoint Server with Standard Client Access License, it’s not a trial, so it’s not my key problem.

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When move the mouse to the input box, it shows a default cursor, instead of a text cursor, which means it is disabled. I tried inside and outside the VM, different browsers, nothing really help.

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I don’t have the time to troubleshoot what the hell happened, so here’s the trick:

Get your IE8 developer tool out, and point it to the disabled input box.

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Now you can have the line highlighted. Hmm, disabled=”disabled”. Let’s change it to trick the page.

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I changed the name “disabled” to something that doesn’t make sense. I guess people can have a better idea for this but anyway.

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Now I can input my Enterprise license key to the box. Wait, OK button is still disabled. Time for the same trick…

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After Ok button is enabled, click on it, the feature for Enterprise CAL now can be unlocked without any problem.

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I don’t know what caused the original problem. But anyway, this is a quick way to have a workaround.

Note: this is not for production use. If you got the same issue on a production farm, better call support.