Hello, is it possible to have a download link for the Rhino 7 installer so that my students can install Rhino 7 (not 8 which is on the download page) for a trial so they have the same version on their laptops as the university PCs? Website will only give a Rhino 8 link but having different versions might cause a headache because you can’t open R8 files in R7 without saving backwards?
Sorry, no.
V8 was released on 31 October, so having an evaluation for a version that can not be directly purchased would just be confusing.
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IT refuse to update things other than once a year in August so there’s no way they will update our installations, and Rhino 8 is likely still buggy which they wouldn’t approve of. If I have a R7 installer exe already can they install that and then click to use a trial?
No, because you would need a license key for the eval…
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So the evaluation installer is different to the actual installer? What if I could find a copy of the R7 trial installer?
As far as I know, the installer is the same, the difference is that downloading the eval from the downloads page automatically generates a license key. If you don’t download, you don’t get a key.
Could you expand on your use case here?
Why aren’t the students just signing in using the university license group? Not enough licenses so you ask some students to do trial for a semester? Not cloud licenses?
Helvetosaur may be your man if you want creative (but legitimate) solutions for Rhino deployment.
We have 90 licenses on the server, more than we ever need at the same time, however students like to have it on their laptops too so I need them to have R7 on both because getting R8 on uni PCs won’t happens.
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Ok, so you have plenty of licenses available for cloud use, and you just need a download of V7 so you can do the actual installs to use existing licenses?
If that’s the case then I think John and the rest of us got thrown by your use of the word ‘trial’. It sounds like you don’t need evaluation copies, just V7 download support for users of existing V7 licenses until the institution gets around to buying V8 (someday). Is that correct?
It’s some work, but you can create a team with your lab licenses and then invite the students to join the team (via their e-mail adresses). You can then share the V7 lab licenses with them on their laptops. When they’re done, remove them from the team.
Yeah some staff do this but they have to be on the vpn to use server based licenses. It is easiest for me to get the students to download the trial for their laptops because it is 90 days and the module is only 60 days long.
That’s why the Cloud Zoo is much better than the LAN Zoo for sharing licenses this way. No need for a VPN.
Side benefit:
With the cloud zoo, McNeel provides and the Uni gets to see documentation that the licenses they paid for are being used (unlike the trial hack) and that’s presumably good when he puts in a proposal to justify upgrading to V8.
A different usecase but asking the same question from my usecase would be:
A potential customer wants to demo our plugin - we do not support Rhino 8 yet (i’m working on it!).
Is there anyway they can trial Rhino 7?
Hi David -
No.
-wim
@wim Short and sweet 
I better crack on with preparing Rhino 8 support then!
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Do you have a spare V7 license? You can put it in a team in your Rhino account/Cloud Zoo and invite the customer to become a member during a trial period. When the period is over, just remove them from the team.
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ah now that’s a cunning approach, yeah i can make that work Thanks!
So what would happen in industry if a company had several R7 licenses and wanted to add more R7 licenses? Would they be able to buy more or not because it “cannot be directly purchased”?
Buy new V8 licenses and get the free “legacy” V7 licenses using the V8 license keys.
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