Lan Zoo bug fixing and improvements

Zoo
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1

Hi

i’m currently upgrading 60 Rhino 8 licenses and it takes me days to do this. That’s the reason i post this topic and i really hope McNeel takes it very serious. I have big problems adding the licenses and a hard time entering those information just to upgrade our licenses.
Therefore i made a list what is not working well:

  • Oops!
    image
    No one want to see a dialog with “Oops!”. Even more i don’t want that Zoo crashes if i click on “Options” or “Continue”. But this happened to me like 20 times now and there is more to come :scream:
    Can anybody have a look in there why it keeps crashing?
  • E-Mail Verification
    Are you aware that everyone has to type the mail two times per license? Did i mention we have 60 licenses and i have to enter it 120 times? No wait “Oops!”: please enter your mail again. This would be then 160 times so far :see_no_evil:
    Why don’t you remember the mail from the last license?
    Why don’t you replace this license entry with one-time authentication with the Rhino-Account?
  • Mass import of licenses
    As already mentioned many times from my side or as more recent from @Helvetosaur in Quantity upgrades and offline install - #12 by John_Brock there are company’s which have a lot of licenses and want to import them all in once.
    What about an import from file where the license codes are listed, maybe with the old license codes if it is an upgrade code?
  • New Feature: Team feature also in Lan-Zoo
    Would it be possible to make also the team functionality in Lan-Zoo to explicitly assign some licenses to a team (or a single user)?
  • New Feature: More status information in http://zoo/status
    Would i be possible to add come more information like checkout time, exactly Rhino version, if it is borrowed?

I really hope i get a feedback directly from McNeel and i want to encourage everyone who has similar experiences to vote for any of this bugfixes or changes.

Thank you

2

Yes, this is one area that has been sadly neglected. There is no provision either in the LAN Zoo or the Cloud Zoo for adding more than one license at a time. So the biggest users who buy the most licenses are unfortunately penalized the worst…

Although not heavily advertised, there are multi-user keys available in 10- 50- and 100 quantities. So your 60 licenses could be replaced with just two. Unfortunately, this still requires manual intervention from McNeel and it could result in some downtime as the original licenses need to first be removed and invalidated before the new keys are issued. Once that’s done, future upgrades are simpler.

3

How hard would it be to somehow advise a large multi license purchaser of this when such a purchase is initiated? I’m thinking here of the online purchase process.

This question is not meant as a substitute for the suggested improvements mentioned above.

And what about a multiuser offline customer and the validation process? It’s a pain for even one installation so I can’t imagine the angry incantations that fill the room of the administrator trying to validate even just 5 or 10 installations, let alone 60.

4

The problem is that because the multi-user keys are a recent thing, most big companies have accumulated a huge packet of individual licenses, via new licenses + upgrades from previous versions as they expanded. The main thing is the one-time conversion from a pile of individual keys to one or more multi-user keys. That still is a more or less manual process which can only be done by McNeel.

As a reseller I do advise my clients who have 10 licenses or more. They are listed on the McNeel website under “Buy”:

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Yep. Right now I’ve got a client with 20 offline upgrades to do and they’re not particularly happy about that.