How can we update the Insight for Excel license file for existing clients in an environment with hundreds of client machines without having to do this manually on each client?
Background
In an enterprise environment there could be hundreds of client machines having Insight for Excel installed and the number could be increasing. Each installation of Insight for Excel requires a valid license file on the local client machine. This means that when the licenses are renewed and a new license file is received, the administrator needs to manually re-install the new license file on each Insight for Excel client installation.
Doing this manually is time consuming and tedious so the question is to find an alternative method to resolve this.
Answer
There is no need to run an installer to update the license file. You require to only replace the outdated license file with a new valid license file. The license file (named "insightforexcel.lic" by default) is located in:
The name of the new license file is not required to be identical to the name of the old license file. Any valid file name can be used as long as it has the "*.lic" extension. Then, push the new license file to the appropriate location, it is not necessary to remove the old license file.
Alternative 1
Customers can use Group Policy Objects or any other mechanism currently used for software deployment on client machines to push the new license file onto the client.
Alternative 2
Another way to do this is to use the Windows task scheduler to copy a license file from a known place on the network to the local computer on a regular schedule (say the first day of every month). See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/taskschd/schtasks
The scheduled task can be run as System (so that it can access C:\Program Files). Just copy the license file from a remote file share to the local machine and place it in the folder for example, "C:\Program Files\BIOVIA\Insight for Excel 2018\System\Licenses\".
For example, if the remote share is called XXX, create a .bat file on the local machine that contains:
copy /Y \\xxx\insightforexcel.lic "c:\program files\biovia\insight for excel 2018\system\licenses\"
The /Y will suppress any overwrite confirmation prompt.
Alternatively, create this file on the XXX remote share.
Then create a scheduled task:
schtasks /Create /S system /SC MONTHLY /MO LASTDAY /TN "Update Insight for Excel license" /TR \\XXX\updateInsightForExcelLicense.bat
where:
XXX\updateInsightForExcelLicense.bat is the command file to copy the remote license to the local machine.
XXX must be readable by the system account.
To delete the task:
schtasks /Delete /S system /TN "Update Insight for Excel license"
