Hello I did some contract work for a company who purchased Pro 2017 for me.
My contract ended and I continued to use the software at home on my own machine.
I want to upgrade to a newer version because the software continually crashes on my Mac and I am also considering going back to PC because of the crashing issue.
I have the license number and contacted support.
Here is their reply:
"Thanks for your note. We understand that you’d like to request information for a SketchUp Pro license. Since this license is registered to another email address: **xx, at an address different from the email address you are writing to us from, please have an authorized user contact us at Support - Customer Support Question | SketchUp Help from the email address/domain: **xx to retrieve the license or request changes to it.
You are also welcome to use our SketchUp Pro license manager to retrieve your SketchUp Pro license with the correct email address here: License Manager | SketchUp.
Thank you for your understanding the importance of protecting the privacy of your SketchUp Pro license."
I was then contacted with:
"Thanks for your note. It looks like the license was originally associated with ***xx email address. If you are unable to contact us from that email address to confirm that this change of ownership is approved, we will need another form of proof that you are the authorized person to make the changes to this SketchUp Pro license. Please reply to this email with the last four digits of the credit card that was used to pay for the original license, the date of the purchase and the billing address associated with the order and we will be able to make the requested changes to your email address.
We take license privacy seriously at SketchUp. We appreciate your assistance and await your response."
I do not have that information.
I replied with:
" Please give me the price to upgrade to 2019 Pro or later.
If this licence can be upgraded, great. If not what is the cost?"
and was contacted a day later with:
“Thanks for your reply. This license was manually deactivated by the owners with the domain xx. Without access to this domain, I cannot assign it to you. If you believe that you own this license, you will have to contact them to be in touch with us about assigning it to you.”
THIS LEADS ME TO THE FOLLOWING:
If the license was manually deactivated by the company that purchased it (for me) then why can I not have the software that was purchased - for me? The company clearly has no need for it as they deactivated it.
I have the license number but not the email address that went with it.
This is very frustrating.
I continue to use this software on my home office computer but can not upgrade it due to no longer having the original email address. I am no longer in touch with my former company.
Has anyone else had this issue?
TIA
"
The company purchased a SketchUp license for you to use while you were doing contract work for them.
When the contract ended, you continued to use the SketchUp Pro with the license the company owned.
They requested that the license be deactivated since they apparently had no need of it. ( I expect that deactivated actually means discontinuation of Maintenance and Support since the license for SU2017 Pro is perpetual.)
You’ve continued to use SketchUp 2017 Pro with the license that company purchased and owns.
Now you would like to have the license transferred to you.
Hi David the license was purchased for me as part of the contract.
The software license was included as part of the contract for the work I did and I was told that it was mine.
There is nothing nefarious here - I earned the software and was told as much.
if the license was ordered by and registered for the company, the company is obviously the offic. licensee regardless what they have agreed with you.
Transfering the license to a new licensee needs some cooperation of the old licensee which seems to be not very surprising and is a common policy for more or less every license transferral. Otherwise e.g. a freelancer with access to the license data could occupy a license by simply requesting it at Trimble, which would surely lead to lots of annoying issues.
I looked into this, and it’s a curious case. Speaking vaguely, to protect identities, some equipment was stolen and the owner called customer service to find out if something could be done about the installed SketchUp. The existing license was closed down, and a replacement was made.
If you ask the person who the replacement license was made out to, to email us to ask for a transfer of the license to you, we should be able to do that. His initials are NY.
Hopefully that will work out for you. If it does, it would cost $180 to reinstate and to pay for the next 12 months of maintenance and support. That would immediately give you access to the 2019.2 version, and to any updates within the next 12 months.
A lot of us at SketchUp are using Macs, there isn’t anything bad about that. Quite a lot of difficult support issues we have are on Windows machines. You could, if you wanted, download and install the 2019.2 version, and sign in to get a 30 day trial. That would be one way to find out if the later version helps with crashes.
By the way, the replacement license was a 2018 one. If you only get the license transferred to you, and you don’t renew support, you would need to install 2018 in order to use that replacement license.
Hi Colin thanks for that.
I dont know anyone at … with the initials NY so they must have come in after I left. This is the first that I am hearing about any equipment theft as well.
It seems like I am out of luck even though I have the software installed on my machine as well as having all the license info.
I’m at LAX at the moment, we just did two days of SketchUp training here. When I’m at the office tomorrow I will check with colleagues to see if there are other options.