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.

  • Hi Alison,

    thank you for your feedback. Please note for the stuck license issue we had it was not possible to free up the license using the methods described in the articles you gave. I rang tech support and asked them specifically if we could use the methods described in the articles given and they told me for our situation our license was stuck on SDL server where only the tech support had access to it.   The tech support person informed me the only way to free our license for the scenario we had was to call them up.    I had tried a number of ways to free up the license from the control panel and all of them were unsuccessful.

    best regards

    John

  • Hi John,

    I've just read this post by Paul Filkin:

    You can actually reset your own licence for all versions so no need to contact SDL at all unless you are having problems resetting it.

    For SDL Trados 2007 and SDL Trados Studio 2009 use this KB article gateway.sdl.com/.../communityknowledge and follow the instructions.

    For SDL Trados 2011 and SDL Trados Studio 2014 use this KB article gateway.sdl.com/.../communityknowledge and follow the instructions.

    For SDL Trados 2015 and SDL Trados Studio 2017 use this KB article gateway.sdl.com/.../communityknowledge and follow the instructions.

    So, there already is a way of resetting one's own license! I don't think it covers all possibilities but it's a start!

    All the best,

    Alison