Re: [Framers] Adobe Licensing/Installation Rant - Follow up - Warning - Long email

[Tammy Van Boening]

First of all, thank you to each and everyone of you who responded offlist
and onlist to assist me. It was sincerely appreciated, and one offlist
response as I mentioned earlier was the saving grace. To me, the most
frustrating part about all of this is the fact that Adobe still has such
loyal followers after all these years, and yet the loyalty just doesn't seem
to be recognized. Over the last two days, I have had multitudes of offlist
responses about folks who have gone through the same type of
licensing/installation discord with Adobe with very little, if any timely
support assistance, at all. One list member even stated the following:

I'm so sorry that you're going through this.   Unfortunately this seems to
be the norm these days for Adobe.
Have you tried tweeting their support page?  I've had about a 90% success
rate getting an answer through twitter.  I've had zero success through other
avenues.

Really? You have to go to these lengths to get support? I was in the throes
of setting up two systems over the last two days, and during this process, I
had questions for both Madcap and Quadralay about some known installation
issues. When I called Madcap (who like Adobe supposedly does, provides
immediate and free support when it comes to installation issues), within
three minutes I was connected to a support technician here in the states who
could communicate clearly in both directions, understand what my question
was and provide the information that I need immediately. The installation
went off w/out a hitch as a result. When I reached out to Quadralay support,
within 15 minutes max., again I had the response that I needed and again, a
painless update and installation.

In today's market, time is money, and money is tight, so the more time that
I have to spend mucking around with a product, the less and less likely that
I am to want to keep using that product. For my smaller clients who don't
have any writers on staff and whose staff that is available don't want to be
writers, Adobe Framemaker is still the way to go for them to do periodic
updates on their own in between major releases. It's a true WSIWYG, and I
set them up with clean, simple templates that essentially give them a click
and point environment. Even then, they might have a few questions every now
and then, and although I have directed them to the Adobe Forums, at least
50% of the time, they don't get a response to their question in a timely
fashion, and so reach out to me. So, instead of being able to work through
what should be a simple issue for free, they have to reach out to me, and
that's billable time . .  .I too have had this issue - w/ no response to a
forum question. What good is self-service if you can't get service? 

For my larger clients, Flare is absolutely a viable option because they have
a writing staff, and they have someone who likes to do the "under the hood"
stuff for Flare with the CSSs etc., and they get paid to be on that larger
learning curve during the day, they can deal with the implications of a not
true WYSIWYG and again, the support is superb, not only through paid
support, but also through the forums. I never once have had a question go
unanswered on Flare's forums. To be sure, 3 out of my 5 largest clients have
all switched to Flare for these very reasons. They were once loyal Adobe
shops, but the bad seriously began to outweigh the good.

I ultimately did receive a response from the Acrobat team yesterday, but it
was at 3:30 in the morning my time, and over 15.5 hours since my first post
to the list (which was only after 1 hour of Adobe support h*ll.) How is that
"support?" And yes, there are several really good Adobe folks who monitor
this list such as Priyank and a few others, but they are the rarity, not the
norm. any more for Adobe. It shouldn't take an angry and frustrated customer
crying out for help to get what they need.

Adobe, you really, really need to step up to the plate and support those of
you who still support you. The number of folks switching to other tools such
as Flare is increasing as we have seen not only from personal experience,
but also from comments on the Framers and other lists such as Tech_Whirl. It
should be a corporate effort to train your folks to step up to the plate and
provide gracious, timely and accurate customer service.

As I stated, in today's market, time is money, and money is tight, so
whether you're an independent or an FTE, ultimately the bottom line and
customer service is going to drive folks to different tool selections.

Thanks all for letting me rant - I just really wanted to get this out to
Adobe.

TVB



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Re: [Framers] Adobe Licensing/Installation Rant

[Robert Lauriston]

Try downloading the latest installer:
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-downloads.html#download_11_10

XI is supposed to be supported through 15 Oct. 2017.
https://www.adobe.com/support/products/enterprise/eol/eol_matrix.html#86

On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Tammy Van Boening
 wrote:
> Since Adobe monitors this list, hopefully this will get someone to pull
> their head out of their backside and provide customer service!!! I have a
> legally purchased fully licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat XI. I am having to
> set up a new laptop, which includes my Adobe products (which I want to do
> about as much as Custer wanted another Indian!). I deactivated my
> installation of Acrobat XI on my old laptop and I am attempting to install
> Acrobat XI on my new laptop. The installation appears to be going just fine
> and then blam. . . I get a message about having to rollback the installation
> and the installation is rolled back and nuked and I get the message that the
> installation was unable to complete, but absolutely NO error code/nothing to
> assist or hint as to what is the issue.
>
> I am installing on a Windows 7 64-bit Dell E6420 Latitude that has MORE than
> enough RAM for what I am installing. (and that's exactly the setup of my old
> laptop on which I deactivated the copy.)
>
> I tried to call Adobe support, but after I get through IVR h*ll, and follow
> all the prompts correctly, I get the absolutely useless message that Adobe
> does NOT provide phone support for my product. Really Why is this? So,
> of course, I have to resort to chat and after 35 minutes of frustration with
> the "helpful" Adobe CSR, I gave up.  . .
>
> First, email is NOT the way to go bluntly with the language barrier that I
> was experiencing, and second, the dude was obviously multi-tasking because
> there were many lapses of several minutes during our useless chat where he
> did not respond at all to my inquiries or acknowledge that I had provided
> him the requested information.
>
> Really Adobe, this is how you treat someone who has been a customer since
> '96???
>
> I need help troubleshooting this installation and getting it up and running
> - there should NOT be an issue with what is supposed to be a plug and play
> installation from a CD and with a valid license number.
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Re: [Framers] Adobe Licensing/Installation Rant

[Tammy Van Boening]

Hi all,

OK, I received several offlist replies and here is the one that solved the
issue: 

Yes, I do have Framemaker 10 installed on the same laptop. And yes, during
the installation of Acrobat Pro XI, I did the receive message that I have
received like 6 times before when setting up new systems about Acrobat Pro
finding the Adobe PDF Maker plugin on the system (installed as part of
Framemaker 10) and to go ahead with the installation, I would need to click
Continue to uninstall the PDF Maker plugin and continue with the
installation of Acrobat XI. I clicked Continue - like I said, I have done
this setup many, many times before in the process of setting up a new system
and never had had problems in the past.

Well, apparently, sometimes, in that rare "blue moon" period, this uninstall
does NOT go cleanly and that prevents Acrobat XI from being installed, and
you get the rollback message and the message about the failure to uninstall,
but nothing about what is causing the  issue.

So, I used Revo Uninstaller Pro 3 to do a forced uninstall of anywhere and
everywhere that little remnants of this plugin could be found, then rebooted
and then tried the installation again, and voila! It worked - sped through
like a charm and like I had always seen in the past.

Because I had NEVER run into this issue before, I would have never thought
to consider this a problem.

Thank you to my offlist savior and on to more fun with Adobe deactivations
and installations. . .  I will make a great asylum patient in a haunted
house after all of this. 

TVB



-Original Message-
From: Priyank Shrivastava. [mailto:priya...@adobe.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2016 11:42 AM
To: Tammy Van Boening; framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: [Framers] Adobe Licensing/Installation Rant

Hi Tammy,

I apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Let me forward this to Acrobat team to get this addressed.

Thanks,
Priyank Shrivastava.

-Original Message-
From: Framers
[mailto:framers-bounces+priyasha=adobe@lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf
Of Tammy Van Boening
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2016 10:58 PM
To: framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: [Framers] Adobe Licensing/Installation Rant

Since Adobe monitors this list, hopefully this will get someone to pull
their head out of their backside and provide customer service!!! I have a
legally purchased fully licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat XI. I am having to
set up a new laptop, which includes my Adobe products (which I want to do
about as much as Custer wanted another Indian!). I deactivated my
installation of Acrobat XI on my old laptop and I am attempting to install
Acrobat XI on my new laptop. The installation appears to be going just fine
and then blam. . . I get a message about having to rollback the installation
and the installation is rolled back and nuked and I get the message that the
installation was unable to complete, but absolutely NO error code/nothing to
assist or hint as to what is the issue.

I am installing on a Windows 7 64-bit Dell E6420 Latitude that has MORE than
enough RAM for what I am installing. (and that's exactly the setup of my old
laptop on which I deactivated the copy.)

I tried to call Adobe support, but after I get through IVR h*ll, and follow
all the prompts correctly, I get the absolutely useless message that Adobe
does NOT provide phone support for my product. Really Why is this? So,
of course, I have to resort to chat and after 35 minutes of frustration with
the "helpful" Adobe CSR, I gave up.  . . 

First, email is NOT the way to go bluntly with the language barrier that I
was experiencing, and second, the dude was obviously multi-tasking because
there were many lapses of several minutes during our useless chat where he
did not respond at all to my inquiries or acknowledge that I had provided
him the requested information.

Really Adobe, this is how you treat someone who has been a customer since
'96???  

I need help troubleshooting this installation and getting it up and running
- there should NOT be an issue with what is supposed to be a plug and play
installation from a CD and with a valid license number.

 

Tammy Van Boening
Owner/Principal
Spectrum Writing, LLC
www.spectrumwritingllc.com
TammyVB  *AT*  spectrumwritingllc  *DOT*  com


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