Business Central - Importing your Business Central License (Onprem)

Sep 6

After posting about how you can export your Business Central license with a single command, I figured I would do the same in putting it in there!

It seems that this may be unique to onprem Business Central and not so much with SaaS. However, it is good to know some very simple commands, especially importing your Business Central license.

Whenever your license changes, either you add licensed users or module, your partner will generate a new Business Central license in a form of a .flf or .bclicense file. You will need to import your license into your Business Central environment. I would suggest that you apply it on both Production and other environments. I would also suggest that you schedule this task as this process will require you to restart your Business Central instance.

Note: The bclicense file type is only support on version 17.2, 18.7, 19.1 and later.

Utilizing Business Central Administration Shell, you' will need make sure that you run it as an Administrator. So you must have the local admin rights to do so. By right-clicking on the application icon, you should see the option “Run as Administrator”. Go ahead and click it, then you will be prompted to choose Yes or No. So click, Yes with intent.

The Business Central Administration Shell should open, it looks like a Command Prompt if you’ve seen it before. It will provide you a list of existing Cmdlet options. In this case, we want to utilize the Import-NAVServerLicense.

The minimum requirement for this Cmdlet is Import-NAVServerLicense ‘MyInstance’ -LicenseFile '“Path”. With the example below, you can see that the command I entered is “Import-NAVServerLicense BC190” -LicenseFile “C:\temp\YourLicense.flf”. Once you press enter, it will give you a warning that a restart of the service is required.

The next step would be to restart the Business Central service by following the command: “Restart-NAVServerInstance -ServerInstance BC190” and press enter. This takes a few seconds to complete and will provide you information regarding your service being restarted and the current state. That’s it! You’ve successfully imported your Business Central license! Now go on and celebrate!