Ted,
Thanks for this post. Yours was actually the best explanation I found of what happened and I quoted it and set it off to my managers.
I'm the guy who is responsible for building Adobe packages, getting things ready for deployment and handing out CC subscriptions at a community college with an ETLA license and an enrollment of just over 90,000 students at four, widely-spread campuses. We have Adobe products available in dozens of classrooms and labs and were hit particularly hard by this licensing issue. It didn't help that final exams are next week and students term projects were due this week. My cubicle was ground zero for this crisis.
Adobe's Enterprise Support team was a great help and our campus IT teams had to scramble to get our fix out, but after the initial panic, we managed to get things settled down by Wednesday.
I don't know who here, if anyone, actually knew that we had been given a new license or that an old one is expiring but I think that this should been communicated sooner, more clearly and more widely by Adobe. They could have posted a notice on the Enterprise Dashboard or contacted their sales reps to make sure that everyone they were talking to on the customer side knew this was coming. I really hope that some lessons were learned from this experience and that a change like this will be approached with more caution in the future.
A lot of very talented, dedicated and very smart IT people at this college managed to save Adobe's reputation in the eyes of hundreds (if not thousands) of users at this school. I really hope we don't have to go through this again.
Ric