In 2017 an initiative was introduced to Sage 300 to move licensing from perpetual to subscription. This process required customer sales records to now have a Sage300c subscription, this license is know as Sage 300 cloud.
The term Sage 300 cloud is not a hosted nor a cloud enabled Sage 300 product, the term is a Sales and Marketing term that relates to licensing.
Subscription licensing is activated on the most recent release of Sage 300, regardless of what version is actually installed on site. For example, in the month of June of 2022, Sage 300 2022 is the most recent and active version. When Sage 300 2023 is released, it will be the recent and active version.
This means if you have Sage 300 2020 installed on site and you request an update to your licensing, all updates are made on the customers sales record to the Sage 300 2022 version active version.
Subscription licensing is based on the active serial number.
How subscription works:
1. Sage Sales updates customer product records to active version, when a new version is released a new set of serial number are committed to customer record.
2. Changes are pushed to SLS server (Sales and Licensing Server) in the cloud. This server has customers records to make available to Sage 300 product.
3. When users log into Sage 300, the first user will trigger program to verify against SLS server; the Client ID, Client Name, and Serial Number, to request if there are any changes to entitlement. Client Name, Client ID will not change unless there is a company name change, but the serial number will always be the most recent active version; regardless of what version is installed. This serial number in our example will be Sage 300 2022, even though Sage 300 2020 is install.
4. To verify Client Name, ID, and Serial Number. In Sage 300 desktop select Help, Licenses, License Manager.
5. If any of these three fields do not match records in SLS server, no file is updated.
6. If no changes are available, entitlements.xml file located in Shareddata is not updated. If there are changes, a new version of the entitlements.xml file is downloaded and replaces existing file.
7. Your subscription will be setup with a renewal date, when this date is reached if payment has not been received, SLS will be marked as expired.
8. Sage 300 desktop will still function fully even though an expiration message is present. This expiration message will be maintained for 45 days, at which time Sage 300 will be changed to read-only mode. All screens will only allow records to be viewed, no new transaction will be permitted until payment is updated.
