Recover shared device licenses

When you deploy shared device licenses, you consume the licenses your organization has purchased in the agreement with Adobe. As you deploy these licenses, the count of consumed licenses is indicated on the Products page of the Admin Console.

To recover a license from an inoperable machine, you'll need to reset the licenses of all machines of that product profile. However, to recover the license from the machine to which you have access, you can deactivate the license on that machine itself.

If you need to recover a license from an inoperable machine, use the following procedure to reset the licenses of all machines of that product profile:

All machines mapped to this profile are reset. However, when users sign in to  Adobe's app on any of these machines, the machines are immediately licensed again. For example, if a product profile is mapped to 10 machines and you want to retire two of these machines, use the procedure above to recover the licenses from all 10 machines. When users sign in to  Adobe apps on the other eight machines, these will be immediately licensed again. And you'll have two licenses you can use on another two machines.

Deactivate licenses

If you need to recover licenses from machines to which you have access, you can deactivate the licenses on those machines using the Shared Device Licensing toolkit.

A machine can be activated with a single shared device license. Also, you may install multiple shared device licenses on a single machine. You can choose to deactivate all the licenses on a machine or only deactivate a single license on that machine.

Download and run licensing toolkit

The procedures described in this document require you to execute commands using the Shared Device Licensing toolkit.

First, you'll need to download the Adobe Licensing Toolkit from the following location based on the client machine OS:

• macOS: Download the adobe-licensing-toolkit.dmg and mount the file.
• Windows: Download the zip file and extract the adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe.

How to use the toolkit

Since the toolkit is a command-line utility, you'll need to use the Windows command prompt or the macOS terminal to use it.

If you're unsure of how to execute commands from the Windows command prompt or the macOS terminal, follow these steps:

Deactivate all licenses

On a single shared device, you may have activated multiple licenses. For example, the same device may require different app installations for different groups of students. So, to deactivate all licenses on a device, run the following command with admin privileges:

Windows

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe --deactivate

Short form:

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe -t

macOS

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit --deactivate

Short form:

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit -t

For help on how to run the above commands, see How to use the toolkit.

Deactivate single license

You can also choose to deactivate only specific licenses on a machine. To do this, you will need the NpdId, a unique identifier of the license that you want to remove.

Get license NpdId

To get NpdId for the shared device license packages on a device, run the following command with admin privileges:

Windows

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe --licenseInformation

Short form:

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe -l

macOS

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit --licenseInformation

Short form:

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit -l

For help on how to run the above commands, see How to use the toolkit.

When you run the above command, you will see the following (sample) output:

From the output (see above sample), you need the NpdId for the shared device license that you want to deactivate.

Deactivate specific licenses

Now use the NPIDs from the previous command, to deactivate the required license:

Windows

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe --deactivate --npdId <NpdId from -licenseInformation command above>

Short form:

adobe-licensing-toolkit.exe -t -n <NpdId from -licenseInformation command above>

macOS

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit --deactivate --npdId <NpdId from -licenseInformation command above>

Short form:

sudo ./adobe-licensing-toolkit -t -n <NpdId from -licenseInformation command above>

For help on how to run the above commands, see How to use the toolkit.