Licensing modifications suggestion

SketchUp Feature Requests
1

The licensing troubles I suffered yesterday during a meeting with a customer led me to complain with Support, which led me here today (as I was only given a FAQ extract answer).

When I bought my first license of SU years ago, I was happy I could use it in the office, on my laptop and at home. It was one of the reason which made me choose it as an alternative to AutoCAD and MicroStation, which were giving me a lot of troubles on license verifications.
Since the change of license few years ago (Classic > Subscription) I suffered the problem of authorization on my laptop, which I just pick up before exiting the office to reach customers.
Customers not always have internet connection, and sometimes not even my phone can get a reliable connection when I’m “on the field” (@ customers’ ).
And I’ve waited for too long to have a counter appear somewhere to remind me to “authorize” the PC (fixed or laptop), to hope this SO DIFFICULT feature to be implemented, so I’m not asking this today.

The main problem is that, unfortunately, one of my suppliers made an application running on SU, which is always late, compared to the latest SU release… ( I have now the app working on SU2022, with SU2023 already available… and next year I’ll have the application running on SU2023, with SU2024 available…).
So I always keep the last two versions installed on my office and laptop (I decided to give up this on my home PC, as it would be a PITA…)… but… this makes a total of “4 installations authorized”, if I don’t remember to EXIT MY ACCOUNT each time I exit any SU version from any computer.

And yesterday, as Murphy’s Law teaches, I had a presentation at a customer and needed to use SU2022, which decided it was my 4th instance of SU, so passing the limit of 3 authorized instances.
And there was no INTERNET available at that moment.

Is there any suggestion on how to handle this, beside removing all my SU2023 installations and keeping only SU2022, the ones working with my supplier’s precious app ?

I know it’s not Trimble duty to keep the pace with external applications, but for the same reason, I’d like to avoid to search for an unlawful solution to my problem, while still paying my subscription, just to be able to “jump ahead” an anti-piracy unpleasant feature.

I always thought SU being a tool to increase my productivity, not an obstacle to it.

2

Fwiw, the eula was and still is pretty clear about it (but hé, who reads it anyway:)

You’re allowed to activate on two ‘devices’.

The extra (third) activation that was given with the classic license was mainly for when a machine crashed and you would loose one and to keep support of the hook.
During covid, SketchUp actually raised that number temporarily.

With the subscription model, managing these devices yourself is an improvement, for that matter.
And to activate the classic license, one would still need internet, the only difference was that it would be needed one time only, with subscription, once per month (28 days)

Even when there is a way you could see the number of current activations, or on which devices those were activated in some sort of dashboard, the best practice is to be sure you have your needed devices activated upfront while you still have internet, by managing your devices and than only activate the various installations of SketchUp (devices) on the laptop…

3

Thanks for your answer.
:slight_smile: You’re right… who reads the eula ?

The main problem is that you cannot guess (or remember, actually) when those “28 days” will expire and not even guess which activation are active or not…

The dashboard you’re speaking of would be really useful, if available. But it is not.
You’re referring to the chance of “managing these devices yourself”, but the verb “managing” means something different to me, not just “completely reset all your seats”.

Also, a reminder on SU closing such as “Would you like to keep this activation/session active ?” (optional, preferences settable) would greatly improve the UI experience, helping remembering of this possible future problem.

But I’ve read many other similar requests in different posts in the last few years, while no real help on this aspect coming from newer versions.

And being bounced between support which “defends the fort” and forum which “gives explanations on why the fort needs being defended” is not pretty like a survey on “would you like a feature of this kind to be implemented ?”.
Most users tends reaching the forum on a specific need, not just because they feel the need to give some “pro bono” help (beside fans, obviously).
Anyway, this is just my personal point of view.