Free Upgrade to Contribute 4?

[Daniel Wiercioch]

I just purchased Studio 8 a few days ago. It comes with Contribute 3. Am I entitled to a free upgrade to Contribute 4?

[Sam Poikail]

I called Macromedia Customer Service about this and was told

"No, the Contribute 3 component of Studio 8 did not entitle the customer
to a post-announcement free upgrade to Contribute 4."

I still find this a bit annoying as it seems the message from development
has changed over the years (and possibly with acquistion by Adobe).

Originally Dreamweaver MX could administer Contribute sites without the
developer having Contribute. Then with MX2004, the administrative functions
were taken out of Dreamweaver and DWMX2004 would run code from the
Contribute executable that was included with Studio 2004. We were told
that this was a good thing because:

1) It allowed for the removable of redundant code in the product.

2) The inclusion of Contribute in Studio 2004 allowed the web developer to
just run Contribute if they needed to walk one of their customers through
the use of Contribute and they would be seeing the same this as the user.

Hopefully, the user interface has not changed significantly, because now
anyone with Studio 8 won't be able to take advantage of #2 unless they fork
over the upgrade price.

The last time (when it was still a Macromedia product) I ran into this (I
believe Contribute 2 was released after Studio MX+), I was eligible for the
free post announcement upgrade from Contribute 1 to Contribute 2. I
mentioned this the the rep and was told it was now an Adobe product and that
wasn't the policy (hopefully the patronizing tone was just my imagination).

To add insult to injury, both products (Studio 8 and Contribute) were bought
on the same PO at the same time from the same retailer (who informed me just
before shipping that Contribute 3 was unavailable). I kind of counted on the
post announce upgrade from previous experience, but didn't have a chance to
address the concerns until the last minute because of other commitments.

Really trying to remain philosophical about this, but how hard is it to
abide by the simple rule:

Products in a "suite" should have synchronized release dates.

The alternative is to annoy your customers and just cascades down the user
chain they support.

Would be interesting to see what kind of outcry would result from CS
components falling out of synch. :o/

Cheers,
Sam


"Daniel Wiercioch" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:ei7sir$j4q$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> I just purchased Studio 8 a few days ago. It comes with Contribute 3. Am I

entitled to a free upgrade to Contribute 4?