Upgrading a BizTalk evaluation copy
This week I ran into a rather unusual problem. One of my customers was using the evaluation version of BizTalk for quite a while and recently it expired. Nothing strange here, since this is what evaluation copies are supposed to do. However, this customer was close to going into production with the evaluation machines. They had used evaluation copies of all software (not just BizTalk) to install all of their machines in their DTAP process.
After purchasing the BizTalk licenses, they wanted to enable their BizTalk machines again. However, unlike Windows, BizTalk server is not activated/upgraded or whatever by entering a key. You need to re-install BizTalk.
Luckily we got confirmation from the product team that we could do an in-place upgrade. Just start the BizTalk installation, and your evaluation version will be upgraded to the normal version and everything else remains in place.