Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Software Support

Today I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to get serial numbers so that we could install an upgrade of our Adobe Contribute software under our maintenance contract. Adobe steers you towards an online chat or e-mail address for help, which I have found out the online chat doesn't work through our firewall. Upon finding a phone number and talking to Jack for 30 minutes, I was transferred to another rep.

Side note:

It struck me kind of funny when Jack asked for my first name and phone number and after providing it, he asked if I minded if he addressed me by my first name. I said that was fine, but now I wonder what he would have called me if I said no.


Once reaching the second rep and explaining that we had maintenance on our Contribute licenses and we were trying to install the latest version, but needed the upgraded serial numbers, the rep found our maintenance for the software, but did not show that we owned any licenses of the software. So, they were fine with us purchasing the maintenance when we didn't even own their product?

As it turns out, the name and address that the original licenses were purchased under was different than the name on the maintenance. This the result of the original licenses being purchased prior to our consolidation, so the naming is different. From information given to the rep they were able to see that we had some licenses under the old address, which were originally purchases when it was a Macromedia product. He stated that these were in a different database and what we need to do to get our upgrade under our maintenance is to fill out a Adobe Open Options - No Charge Upgrade Coupon Request, supplying in depth information about each of our 17 licenses. I don't know what is worse, the fact that he could at least see some of the information, and I still have to go back and try to track everything down to prove our original purchases, or the fact that the PDF No Charge Upgrade Coupon Request form, used by the company known for PDFs, looks like it was thrown together by an amateur.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

....but now I wonder what he would have called me if I said no.

HA HA HA very funny. cool blog.

Bonj said...

Thanks.