Missing Features

Adobe licensing error messages, including debug info.

Adobe makes some great software, but the licensing management experience for corporate licenses is an embarrassment.

Your correspondent purchased some additional corporate licenses for Adobe InCopy for two team members. In order to get the serial numbers for the software you need to log into the hapless Adobe Licensing site: http://licensing.adobe.com.

Unfortunately the licenses your correspondent purchased were associated to a new licensing.adobe.com login ID, but needed to be associated to the preexisting ID linked to  other Adobe software already purchased.

Your correspondent had two goals: obtain the license keys and merge this login ID to another login ID. Attempting this feat trivial task revealed a variety of problems:

1. There is no way to merge accounts in licensing.adobe.com.
2. It takes 6+ clicks to get from the contact us link on licensing.adobe.com to a support number (which isn’t the direct support line).
3. You must wait on hold and spend several minutes at the main support line until you are transferred to the licensing team, resulting in a lost queue position and additional hold time.
4. If you attempt to login with the wrong password several times your account is locked out and you must call into Adobe to get your account reactivated.
5. Your correspondent was transferred to a line that rang about 15 times and then soberly declared: “Your party is not answering. Your call will now be disconnected.”
6. Login error and alert messages appear in a tiny font and include actual debugging output.

There are a variety of lessons we can take-away from this:

1. Queue positions ought to be respected when transferred to different departments. If you wait for 10 minutes for the main team and then are transferred to another team queue you should be placed 10 minutes ahead of everyone else.
2. Unless you are creating the login routine for GetNukeLaunchCodes.gov, account lockouts should life after a set time automatically.
3. Licensing sites should include tools that actual help the busy IT professional, like an instant combine/merge accounts feature.
4. Search for and eliminate dead end phone paths. Phone menu systems, like software, need to fail well. In this case, that means routing a person back to a customer service rep (at the top of the queue) when transfers aren’t picked up properly.
5. Check the work of your programmers to ensure that debugging information isn’t revealed to the user on production systems. It’s unprofessional and possibly a security risk.

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