Under Community Review

Free a stuck license from within our own online control panel without having to contact tech support

It would be useful for us to be able to free up our own license when the license gets "stuck" i.e it is showing as being in use when in fact it is not in use. The only way to free our license up when it is in the stuck state is to send a support ticket. All the time we are locked out of our own software and cannot do our project work - this is for software we have paid for. I have lost 1 day's project work because our license was stuck in the system with no way to free it. Eventually I just had to call support to get it freed up. However if this occurs at the weekend or in the evenings we have to wait until we can get support.

We should be able to free our license from our own online SDL account.  

In addition if we can free our own license then it would also reduce the amount of time your support is being used up just to free licenses.

What caused this issue in our case?

It would be helpful to have the correct Licensing activation screen is displayed for the software we have downloaded from our SDL account instead of the incorrect license activation.

We have SDL professional Network license and downloaded this from our SDL network license account however when we installed the software the Freelance Activation is displayed instead. If we then enter our license into the freelance license box it will lock our network license from being used and we have to then contact Tech support to free the license. There is no way currently for us to free that locked license.

I realise that the Freelance and Professional Network software are in fact the same software and that the features we get (pro or freelance) are unlocked depending on which license we have however SDL can still maintain the same software code base but simply set the correct activation screen for the license we have is simple enough for Trados to do. If we download from our Professional account we expect to see ONLY the professional activation procedure - not a freelance activation procedure. 

If you can't provide the correct License activation screen the very least then would be to provide an error message stating that the license is not correct for the activation procedure we are attempting to use and not allow activation. The present an error message stating the correct activation procedure.

All of this is pretty simply and straight forward to implement and would save users of Trados software being unnecessarily inconvenienced by having their software locked with no means to deal with the issues without tech support.

John Bolton
Parents

  • Hello, thank you for your response - I will clarify a little more on this. This issue is not due to a "bug" as such or faulty coding in this particular case. It is to do with how the current license management logical process is setup.  If a certain set of conditions arise - which we documented in our ticket the license can get stuck.   It is not down to the software being irratic due to a bug.    Therefore  it is not so much an issue of faulty coding as much as faulty procedure for handling the license.   Faulty coding can be very difficult (if at all) to resolve if a program is using legacy code (as is the case from Trados studio as far as I am aware)   I agree that the software is still notoriously buggy however according to support this is not a bug based on the code but an issue in the logic of how the software handle the license.

    If Trados change the way the the licenses are handled then the license  can always be freed up.  

    This feature request was getting upvotes however the votes stopped after these follow up posts presumably because users may think there is either there is a already a solution (when there is not) or that the issue is due to buggy software (which also it is not in this case) The issue in this case is down to the logical license handling procedure which needs to be modified so that the license can always be freed up no matter what.  

    I can understand why Trados have used legacy code and why they have now re-written the entire code base because we also are involved with code writing.  There needs to be an undersanding of how much time and money it takes to re-write all legacy code. It is a massive undertaking that financially may not even be feasible.  Microsoft themselves also use legacy code because the cost to reporgram from scratch everything is monumental.   I am not intending to defend Trados on bugs in their software. I'm explaining here that this issue is not due to a bug in their software rather in the rationale on how they handle the licenses. They just need to modify the procedure on how the licenses are handled.

    In conclusion:  Please vote for this proposal if you want to be able to free up your software license any time under all circumstances so that Trados modify the procedure on how the licenses are handled.

Comment

  • Hello, thank you for your response - I will clarify a little more on this. This issue is not due to a "bug" as such or faulty coding in this particular case. It is to do with how the current license management logical process is setup.  If a certain set of conditions arise - which we documented in our ticket the license can get stuck.   It is not down to the software being irratic due to a bug.    Therefore  it is not so much an issue of faulty coding as much as faulty procedure for handling the license.   Faulty coding can be very difficult (if at all) to resolve if a program is using legacy code (as is the case from Trados studio as far as I am aware)   I agree that the software is still notoriously buggy however according to support this is not a bug based on the code but an issue in the logic of how the software handle the license.

    If Trados change the way the the licenses are handled then the license  can always be freed up.  

    This feature request was getting upvotes however the votes stopped after these follow up posts presumably because users may think there is either there is a already a solution (when there is not) or that the issue is due to buggy software (which also it is not in this case) The issue in this case is down to the logical license handling procedure which needs to be modified so that the license can always be freed up no matter what.  

    I can understand why Trados have used legacy code and why they have now re-written the entire code base because we also are involved with code writing.  There needs to be an undersanding of how much time and money it takes to re-write all legacy code. It is a massive undertaking that financially may not even be feasible.  Microsoft themselves also use legacy code because the cost to reporgram from scratch everything is monumental.   I am not intending to defend Trados on bugs in their software. I'm explaining here that this issue is not due to a bug in their software rather in the rationale on how they handle the licenses. They just need to modify the procedure on how the licenses are handled.

    In conclusion:  Please vote for this proposal if you want to be able to free up your software license any time under all circumstances so that Trados modify the procedure on how the licenses are handled.

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