Determining Creative Cloud for Enterprise Serial Number Expiration Dates

Yesterday in #adobe on MacAdmins Slack, Nate Felton asked the following question about what he sees on the Adobe Licensing Website:

Which led to a discussion of why one serial number was better than the other, including asking “How does one know when their Creative Cloud Enterprise serial number is going to expire?” For those with sufficient rights to the Adobe Licensing Website, the code (for example “SN184”) is available there:

But what this code meant was unclear.  A couple of quick searches led to this post by Alister Black on Adobe’s discussion forums:

> So the SN184 key expires in (April?) 2018?

Q4 2018

This caused me to reach out to our Adobe rep for clarification:

> For colleagues who have serial numbers such as SN194, SN201,
> SN213–those would be Q4 2019, Q1 2020, and Q3 2021,
> correct?

Yes. And note that our FY begins on December 1st. SN194 = November 30, 2019

Serial numbers designated in the licensing website with a “SNYYQ” designation expire at the end of the quarter designated by “Q” and the year that ends with the last two digits designated by “YY”, keeping in mind that quarters are calculated using Adobe’s fiscal year which starts on December 1.

If the currently-installed serial number will soon expire, users will be notified with a warning similar to this (thanks to Chris Helming on MacAdmins Slack for the screenshot):

Also note it seems to be a rule of thumb that serial numbers expire about one year after the end of the Creative Cloud for Enterprise agreement, which seems to be a gracious amount of time to allow for a new agreement to be hammered out.