Replace Product Key
When I entered the product key for two of my Exchange servers, I mistakenly entered an Enterprise key. I should have entered a Standard version key. When I try to change to the appropriate key, it tells me the product is already licensed. How can I change the key?Also, is it safe to do this? These servers are in production.Thanks.EDIT: As I have been looking into this it appears there is no way to replace the product key from Enterprise down to Standard without reinstalling Exchange. Is this true? Can a simple mistake such as installing the wrong key actually require that I reinstall Exchange in an existing production environment.Considering the download for Exchange Standard and Exchange Enterprise are the exact same file, I would think the licensing method would be a bit more clear.Now what?
July 13th, 2008 5:21pm

Try to change the key with below cmdlet in Exchange Management Shell. Set-ExchangeServer ServerName -ProductKey abcd-abcd-abcd-abcd-abcd
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July 14th, 2008 2:03am

As I said, when I try to change the key to a standard key, I get the message that the product is already registered. Using that cmlet doesn't work. If the only option is to reinstall Exchange, I'll have to have a talk with MS I suppose. It seems like a pretty extreme measure to me. Hopefully there is another option.
July 14th, 2008 2:41am

You would think that changing to a standard key would be easier. Are you using any Enterprise server features (more than 5 storage groups, clustering...) that might prevent the utility from changing the key?
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July 14th, 2008 7:47am

I checked with some folks at Microsoft and got this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232170(EXCHG.80).aspx "You cannot use product keys to downgrade from Enterprise Edition to Standard Edition, nor can you use them to revert to the Trial Edition. These types of downgrades can only be done by uninstalling Exchange2007, reinstalling Exchange2007, and entering the correct product key." Important lesson here, be careful when entering product keys! Yikes!
July 14th, 2008 8:08am

This is obviously my mistake but considering the key doesn't show up on our MVLS site like all of our other products and considering that the download for Exchange is a single download for both versions, you'd think they would make this a bit more clear. I fail to see why the key can't be used to change the version especially since I do not have any Enterprise versions installed on these servers. Amazing.
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July 14th, 2008 5:55pm

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