Michal Eliszewski 

Michal Eliszewski said:

Your support doesn't seem to react to the e-mails it's supposed to receive automatically in case of an error.

And what emails do you think these are?  There is no such thing.

The account web page literally tells me that support was notified about the error when a (de)activation fails. After that, nothing happens... for days, for weeks.

Besides, why an activation that is not supposed to expire does expire every now and then leaves me with questions. There are no obvious technical reasons for this (the expirations happen at different times for different activations under the same license), and it seems to happen every 18 months or so. And when that happened last time, I had to beg support for help, too, but now I am additionally forced to register with this forum since there is no direct link to contact support anymore. This could hardly be more bothersome.

Michal Eliszewski 

Michal Eliszewski said:

The account web page literally tells me that support was notified about the error when a (de)activation fails.

I'd appreciate a screenshot of that.  I'm not aware of anything that informs the support team for licensing if something fails.  I'm pretty sure there may be a generic message that can be picked up by the backend admin system for the overall system which is responsible for many things.  But it won't be specific to you.

Michal Eliszewski said:

There are no obvious technical reasons for this (the expirations happen at different times for different activations under the same license), and it seems to happen every 18 months or so.

I doubt this is anything that happens every 18-months.  But we do sometimes see problems like this.  The reasons are often out of our direct control as we use a solution from Thales for our licensing.  Things can happen there that affect us without us making any changes at all and we do our best to work with Thales to correct them as quickly as possible.

I agree it's frustrating for you, and also for us.  We don't want to have to deal with these sort of problems any more than you want to see them!

Michal Eliszewski said:

there is no direct link to contact support anymore.

There never has been unless you have a support contract.  What you might think was a direct link was probably a website where you could report things but that just meant you went into a big queue.  We decided some time ago to move this to the community because we can help users more this way given not everything users report actually require a support engineer, and many users report things that are not covered without a support contract and they wouldn't be helped anyway... they just waste an engineers time having to respond.  So now we can help more users quickly in the community, some may even find a solution themselves by posting in here, and if a support engineer is required (as your case) then we can convert the thread to a support case right away, which I also did when I responded.

If you think you need direct support all the time then you do have the option to purchase a support contract.  I'm not trying to sell you one, but most people don't really know what this actually means:

• free upgrades to each version of Studio
• a guaranteed response to any question you have
• 1-hour response time to critical requests (such as problems when you have an urgent deadline!)
• access to support telephone numbers to discuss your case
• ticketing system you can log into at any time (very useful when some things might have required development and take a little longer to resolve, or you just want to check back through previous issues)
• local region support based on your preference (APAC, EMEA, NASA)
• escalation process if things are not being handled as you’d wish

If you always upgrade to the latest product anyway then you're missing a trick since you could replace your upgrade cost with a support contract for a very similar cost and benefit a lost more; in addition you have a known cost every year you can budget for as a business expense.

Michal Eliszewski 

Michal Eliszewski said:

The account web page literally tells me that support was notified about the error when a (de)activation fails.

I'd appreciate a screenshot of that.  I'm not aware of anything that informs the support team for licensing if something fails.  I'm pretty sure there may be a generic message that can be picked up by the backend admin system for the overall system which is responsible for many things.  But it won't be specific to you.

Michal Eliszewski said:

There are no obvious technical reasons for this (the expirations happen at different times for different activations under the same license), and it seems to happen every 18 months or so.

I doubt this is anything that happens every 18-months.  But we do sometimes see problems like this.  The reasons are often out of our direct control as we use a solution from Thales for our licensing.  Things can happen there that affect us without us making any changes at all and we do our best to work with Thales to correct them as quickly as possible.

I agree it's frustrating for you, and also for us.  We don't want to have to deal with these sort of problems any more than you want to see them!

Michal Eliszewski said:

there is no direct link to contact support anymore.

There never has been unless you have a support contract.  What you might think was a direct link was probably a website where you could report things but that just meant you went into a big queue.  We decided some time ago to move this to the community because we can help users more this way given not everything users report actually require a support engineer, and many users report things that are not covered without a support contract and they wouldn't be helped anyway... they just waste an engineers time having to respond.  So now we can help more users quickly in the community, some may even find a solution themselves by posting in here, and if a support engineer is required (as your case) then we can convert the thread to a support case right away, which I also did when I responded.

If you think you need direct support all the time then you do have the option to purchase a support contract.  I'm not trying to sell you one, but most people don't really know what this actually means:

• free upgrades to each version of Studio
• a guaranteed response to any question you have
• 1-hour response time to critical requests (such as problems when you have an urgent deadline!)
• access to support telephone numbers to discuss your case
• ticketing system you can log into at any time (very useful when some things might have required development and take a little longer to resolve, or you just want to check back through previous issues)
• local region support based on your preference (APAC, EMEA, NASA)
• escalation process if things are not being handled as you’d wish

If you always upgrade to the latest product anyway then you're missing a trick since you could replace your upgrade cost with a support contract for a very similar cost and benefit a lost more; in addition you have a known cost every year you can budget for as a business expense.