The other day, I was asked by my management to provide the exact day that our Eval copy of SharePoint 2007 would expire. Well, I knew it was before Christmas and I could get a rough idea by looking at the timestamps in the 12 hive, but still didn't have the exact date and time.
After some digging, it turns out that Microsoft was nice enough to include the exact date and time right in the Central Administration console, albeit tucked away in a less than intuitive place.
When you go to Central Administration -> Application Management -> Office SharePoint Server shared Services -> Check Services enabled in this farm, you will see a message like the one below that lists the exact date and time that your SharePoint eval will go belly up … or whatever it is that SharePoint does when you hit the expiration.
I asked MS about the expiration behavior and they said that it was hard to say exactly what it would do, but it would be something between "stop working entirely" and "disable all admin and publishing functions". Really!
