Sage CRM 2021: Ooops! Coping with the Message "A number of Named Users need to be disabled to enable the System License".

1 minute read time.

I faced this message when I attempted to log-on to one of my training installs this morning. This was approximately 10 minutes before the start of a webinar but I am sure there are quite a few partners to whom this message has appeared in equally alarming circumstances! After a 3 second heart-sink moment I recovered and realised what I had done.

I had used a license key that was for 10 named users but I had the reinstalled my instance of Sage CRM and ticked the option to use demo data. Unfortunately the demo data contains 18 active users and so the license was 'blown out of the water'.

The recovery was pretty quick. I only had to open up my SQL Server Management Studio and run the following SQL against my CRM database.

update users
set user_resource = 'TRUE'
where user_userid !=1

The statement set as 'resources' all the users except the system administrator. I could then log-on with out a problem.

Once I had logged on I checked my license key for the legitimate number of users.

And then I selectively re-enabled the different users I needed for the training by marking them as resource false.

Note: I could also have set the users as disabled as neither resources nor disabled users consume a license.