Dongle for Next?

[danio]

Hello - I just contacted a reseller about upgrading our 3.x to Next. He said that CG 'prefers' folks to switch their Dongle to online Licensing prior to upgrading and asked I do so. Just monitoring these forums a bit it seems like the online licensing still has some reliability issues. Do I absolutely HAVE to switch? I saw one statement showing the cutoff is August 1st 2019, so can I still upgrade my Dongle to Next before then?

I really don't mind using the dongle and haven't ever had any issues with it. The online licensing really doesn't provide any incentive to me since I'll be the only one using it and I'm always in the same location at the same computer. Downtime would be unacceptable however, due to always having tight deadlines.

Thanks for any info, looking forward to upgrading.
Daniel

[100%indifferent]

Read this & thought I'd chime in since I'm in a similar situation. I own 2 gui licenses along with 5 render node licenses. I won't go to Next until they make me, simply because of the nightmare posts I've read concerning the online licensing which apparently is forced at this point if you want to upgrade from 3.6. I just looked the other day to buy another render node license & my reseller only sells Next, I'd love the ability to stay on 3.6 for a while since I have a few long-term jobs in prod & don't want to risk an upgrade mid stream. I'd spend the money & get everything upgraded to Next, but there's an entire forum devoted to licensing with peeps basically saying they regret the move. Not to Next, but the online licensing component.

Like you, I'm the only one using everything so the upside of online licensing doesn't do much, while the downside of downtime is unacceptable. Not to mention, I typically render animations over the weekend & Chaos has no support over the weekend. Its bad enough they're like 10 hrs ahead for tech-support purposes.

[danio]

Just FYI to anyone reading this thread, I got a 'No' from support on this. This seems like kind of a hard line stance on dongles considering just yesterday there was another licensing outage.

I'd suggest changing the Sticky post in this forum which (depending on your reading) seems to indicate Dongle upgrades are still available until August:

'From September 1, 2018, Chaos Group will transition away from licensing its products with hardware dongles. The price of dongles delivered by Chaos Group will increase in October 2018 and February 2019. From August 1, 2019, Chaos Group will not update dongles with new licenses or upgrades. All licenses on existing dongles will continue to function as expected indefinitely. See this post for more details.'

[vlado]

Let me double-check this and I will get back to you.

Best regards,
Vlado

[danio]

Let me double-check this and I will get back to you.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thanks Vlado! I'll wait to upgrade to online till I hear back.

[danio]

Let me double-check this and I will get back to you.

Best regards,
Vlado

Hi vlado did you ever hear back on this? Thanks!

[vlado]

Yes; you should be able to get a dongle with your licenses. If you can email us to support@chaosgroup.com and reference this thread, our support team will be able to help you out. Apologies for the confusion.

Best regards,
Vlado

[danio]

Thanks for taking the time, vlado Email to support sent.