We continue to invest in updating Embarcadero’s infrastructure and processes. As we get more and more new developers, having a modern face for the brand and products is important. You will see some of this in RAD Studio itself with 10.3.2. This is a busy, busy year, and I hope that we keep delivering valuable things to you (checkout latest Roadmap blog).
Website and EDN Refresh
We are migrating our website to AWS to increase speed, performance, and reliability. We’re looking forward to refreshing embarcadero.com’s design in early June.
The next site to benefit from a refresh is the EDN Members’ Portal and CodeCentral. The current portal, written in Delphi.NET, has served us well but it’s time to modernize and improve user experience. Just like your development projects, any time developers touch an application is a great time to review which business logic, code, and practices can be streamlined for better performance.
Registration Limits
We have noticed compliance issues and increased Support efforts related to registration limit increases for customers on older product versions, who are no longer on Update Subscription. It is a standard industry practice to provide support to the most recent versions and to customers who have extended maintenance. We updated our processes and now route all issues raised from users who are not on Update Subscription to Sales and Renewals. We realize this is a change to previous operations and to reduce the impact to development projects, we issued a one-time registration limit increase for all customers who are close to hitting their registration count limit. This should address issues with re-installs of your licensed software on existing or new machines. Further, we will continue to look for options to make this more seamless through automation.
Keeping You Informed About Changes
We will try to give plenty of notice for future changes. For example, the team is evaluating what level of access should be granted to non-Update Subscription customers in the “new EDN.” We have thousands of registered users there who have continued to enjoy full access for many, many years since their last purchase. While this may impact some, we hope that the better and faster UX will offset any negatives. The team is also identifying extra Update Subscription benefits to provide through this portal and through GetIt.
We are also trying to relax some of the access limitations to redeeming licenses for previous versions (e.g. 180 day timeframe to request a download and license). We realize that many teams support multiple applications, some new and some not so new. While upgrading everything is a great objective, it is not always practical. We want to make sure that we support these teams well. Given that some people are on really old versions, there are some technical limitations, and we will continue to evaluate ways to address this further to make it more seamless for you, so stay tuned.
Our objective is to make staying on Update Subscription a “no brainer.” We have to work hard to give you more and more value, and you will see the amount of free training, components, templates and sample apps grow. We thank you for your continued support!
Policy Update: We still receive occasional comments on this and want to make sure we are clear on our Policy. Registration limits were introduced a long time ago with very valid use cases, but many of these are now outdated. We still do them, just now they get approved by Account Management (Sales/Renewals) vs. Support. Further, we have done several auto-bumps for everyone that should limit these issues altogether (and will do more as needed). As communicated, over the summer, we will work on a more automated way to increase registration limits through the self-service portal.