So last week I posted about the lack of a setup project “Visual studio 2012 has no more Setup project and the alternative they offer is crap.“.

A few hours later I got a mail from someone at flexera software.

My name is …, and I’m a Senior Technical Support Manager with Flexera Software. Your blog post and tweet were recently brought to my attention, and I wanted to reach out to discuss the situation directly with you. I’m very sorry to hear of your frustration with the overall activation experience, and I want to ensure we get things taken care of as quickly as possible. At the time of receiving this email, have you received an email with your corresponding response code to allow you to activate successfully? If not, here are the missing pieces of information I’ll need to track this down:

God only know how he got that particular emailaddress because I used 2 others to try and activate their product. I’m guessing that G+ has something to do with that.

Anyway I replied and got the response code.

So this week I had to install their product on another computer (the build server).

And again I did not recieve the responsecode via mail. Oh joy. So I sent another mail.

And last Monday I had to install the limited edition on another computer and again I sent the activation mail and 2 days later I still don’t have a reply.

I’m sure our company is not blocking the activation mails since I got the one before that after after 48hours.

I don’t understand why you can’t automate this process and make it faster. This way it is quit unusable, frustrating and a waste of time.

And I admit that I was a little less friendly this time.

But he responded in a correct and timely manner.

I will also take a deeper dive to find out why you’re continually having trouble. I’m not yet sure if it’s a problem on our end or yours, but I will take a closer look and work to get that resolved. Thanks for your continued patience.

And they did find a problem in their processing of the emails.

I also wanted to share the results of my research, and the good news is that we’ve found the problem. It was a problem on our end, not yours, and it was resolved about mid-day on Monday (⁹⁄₁₀). All offline activations submitted after that time were processed successfully, and we don’t anticipate the problem occurring again.

I understand that things can go wrong in software, bugs happen to everyone.

But I’m still not convinced that me having to activate a free product is the way to go for them. If you want me to upgrade to a paying version of your product at a later time, you should make the free version as painless as possible for me as a user. I will choose your product on the trail version or on the free version that is out there. I understand that you want my emailaddress for marketing purposes. But activating that free product seems like a waste of mine and their time.

I find it especially strange that I could not use the same activationcode on multiple computers the code is PC specific. They probably use the same activation software for their paying version and don’t bother to write something different for the free version.

Mind you, I had to use the manual process because our proxy didn’t like their online method. So normally it would be easier to activate.

So even though I am very happy with their service I can not be happy with my experience with their product. I would have rather not needed the service at all.