Microsoft Office Communicator License Expired

I think some of you might encounter this pop-up error “Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 cannot start. The product license may be expired because you are using a pre-release or evaluation copy of the program, or the product key information may have been modified in your Windows registry. Please run Setup to uninstall and then reinstall Communicator.”

This error means the Microsoft Office Communicator has expire or caused by the package install method. You may require to reinstall with the Office communicator again. Get the CD from your MSFT Select CD pack or from you Microsoft Reseller or you may download from MSDN.

Some deployment applications use transforms with the MSI that have included the ProductID property. This ProductID value is set to "none" in the registry key below. This will then trigger the timer for evaluation. Once the timer expired the message will be received. There is no indication to the program that it is running in evaluation mode.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Communicator\1.0\Registration\ProductID

There are 3 options to resolve this issue:

Option 1: Repair the MST (transform) by removing the ProductID property. Then delete the ProductID value in the registry and let the MSI self-heal.

Option 2: Re-push Communicator with the corrected transform & product key. This should run a repair and will replace the bad ProductID in the registry.

Option 3: Push an uninstall package; then the corrected installation package for Communicator