# How to upgrade a license from the QLM Management Console

There are several uses cases where a customer license may need to be upgraded:

* Upgrade to a new version of your product
* Upgrade to new features of your product
* Upgrade of the expiry criteria associated to the license

Note that the Upgrade process creates a new Activation Key and archives the previous Activation Key.

As of QLM v10, it is recommended to **Update** a license rather than **Upgrade** a license. Updating a license allows you to edit a given license and updates its properties without generating a new Activation Key. 

### To upgrade a license 

* Launch the QLM Management Console
* Go to the Manage Keys tab
* Locate the license to upgrade and select it
* Click the **Upgrade** button
* Select the Product, the features and the expiry criteria
* Click Ok. A new activation key will be created.

### To update a license

* Launch the QLM Management Console
* Go to the Manage Keys tab
* Locate the license to update and select it
* Click the **Edit** button
  * To allow a customer to activate new versions of your product, enable the Maintenance Plan
  * To enable/disable features, go to the Features tab and update the selected features
  * To update the number of allowed activations, update Number Of licenses
  * To update the number of floating seats, update the Floating Seats value.
* Click Ok
* To update the expiry date of a license, click Renew Subscription and set a new expiry date
* Click Ok. A new activation key will be created.

Once a license is upgraded or updated, the customer needs to reactivate the license.

When a license is updated, the LicenseValidator class can be configured to automatically connect to the License Server, detect server side changes and reactivate the license automatically without any user interaction.

When a license is upgraded, the customer must manually reactivate his license using the new Activation Key generated by the upgrade process.