Recently my employers purchased £1,400 worth of software – the Adobe Creative Premium Production suite – for me to produce videos and to work on various video related projects on the new Dell XPS system that I have here at home.
Got it home, installed it, started to work on said video project.
Hard drive issues with the Dell meant that I would have to do a re-install of the software at a later date. So, closer to the time that I was going to swap out the hard drives, I deactivated the software. Having experienced the wonders of online activation when hard drives fail without having deactivated first, this seemed the sensible option.
Dell came and fixed the hard drive issues and got home to do a big 6 hour re-install of the OS and applications. Installed the Adobe stuff and activated it. So far so good. Until I needed to install the software on a laptop in the office to do some of the work in the office for a week (which is permissible under the Adobe license – provided that both machines are not running the software at the same time, and there was no chance of that). When the Premium Production suite was activated on the laptop at work, it deactivated the software at home. This seems to go against what Adobe allows in their license. And I'm especially annoyed that I properly deactivated the software prior to re-installing the software on the XPS machine.
In order to try and resolve this issue, I call the activation "hot-line" and am put through to an automated system which asks for the original serial number and an installation number. What installation number? The activation system does not helpfully provide it – only the serial number! The phone system eventually (having to wait for three failed stabs at entering the installation number) puts you in a queue to speak to an operator, but no indication as to how long or where you are in the queue.
Heck, even Microsoft of all companies do this much better than Adobe.
Now, you could say I could have simply used the CDs to install a trial version of the Production suite on the office laptop, but the license says you can use two activations at a time, and maybe I might want to use it from time to time afterwards on the laptop and after 30 days.
Sigh.
Another thing. I sent Adobe Customer Service a query the other day via the Adobe web site, and never heard a dicky bird from them until a message telling me that they felt my issue was resolved. Replying to the email to tell them that it was certainly not resulted in an email bounce back telling me that it was an unmanned address – something not mentioned in the email I had just received from them!
