KMS Activation Fails with Insufficient Activations

PROBLEM:

0xC004F038

The software Licensing Service reported that the computer could not be activated. The count reported by your Key Management Service (KMS) is insufficient. Please contact your system administrator.

CAUSE:

Firstly KMS will not activate anything until it has seen at least 5 clients attempt to activate, so if you have activated less than this, then that’s a normal. However i’m seeing on the KMS event log on the KMS server the following, as you can see the CMID is the same, this means that office 2010 was not rearmed on your image before it was syspreped, so you now have loads of computers with the same CMID.

0x0,5,computer1.domain.local,125bc220-a335-4c7e-bd9d-7305361f0d37,2010/6/10 19:34,0,5,0,6f327760-8c5c-417c-9b61-836a98287e0c

0x0,5,computer2.domain.local,125bc220-a335-4c7e-bd9d-7305361f0d37,2010/6/10 19:32,0,5,0,6f327760-8c5c-417c-9b61-836a98287e0c

SOLUTION:

You can generate a new CMID for a machine by using the following:

Generate a new CMID:

c:\program files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\OSPPREARM.EXE”

Force the activation of Office 2010

C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe “c:\program files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs” /act

You may script it if you have already deployed all your images by running a batch file through Group Policy on machine start:

 @echo off
:OSPP
reg query HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\OSPPREARM
if %errorlevel%==1 (goto RUN) else (goto END)
:RUN
set ProgramFilesPath=%ProgramFiles%
"%ProgramFilesPath%\Common Files\microsoft shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\OSPPREARM.EXE"
C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe "%ProgramFilesPath%\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act
set ProgramFilesPath=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
"%ProgramFilesPath%\Common Files\microsoft shared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform\OSPPREARM.EXE"
C:\Windows\system32\cscript.exe "%ProgramFilesPath%\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /act
REG ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\OSPPREARM"
:END

This is all educated by the technet article by Microsoft, I’ve repeated it here to ensure it does not disappear!

http://blogs.technet.com/b/odsupport/archive/2010/06/14/troubleshooting.aspx