Who else hates Unity Connection 8.x Licensing?

[ahochau_2]

Just because I am left with no other forum to vent I'm looking for an outlet.

Every time we migrate a customer to Unity to Unity Connection with the User Connect licensing we end up wasting hours and hours and hours on the phone with Cisco Licensing to get all the features they are supposed to be entitled to.  If User Connect Licensing entitle the customer to all the feature of Unity connections, why do I have order $0 parts and apply licenses for features.  If Cisco is going to inculde all the features, include it with one license or 1 PAK. Why oh why must we be forced to jump through hoops every time?

The dance goes like this:

Submit a request to licensing, get told "you didn't order the right part, call pre-sales"

Call Pre-sales, get told "you just need to contact licensing"

Explain that I have already done that be told I need to include these $0 part numbers when ordering the new server

Explain that I'm not ordering a new server this is all through PUT

Rinse and repeat until someone gives in and coughs up a license file.

Feel free to join my rant, I'm hoping this will get noticed.

[Brad Martin]

Just spent 8 days fighting with Cisco licensing after a hardware failure on MCS7845 with Unity Connections 7.1.3  (CUWL licensing). We are a wide spread company and have been doing IPT deployments by site for the last four years so we have many PAK's for our licenses. Every time we need to re-license for new hardware or software version it has been quite a battle. They usually can find a portion of our licenses but rarely all of them.

Keep every PAK you've ever been issued and a copy of every license file you're issued. We also have three separate entitlement numbers as we have purchased from multiple vendors. We've started cases with licensing and have been told to go to tac. We've started cases with tac and have been told to go to licensing.

With new software versions coming out oddly often, this process is really getting to be problematic. Sure hope Cisco is working on making this procedure more manageable.

[jmunoz19]

Haha....man I'm always opening cases with Cisco licensing for what should be trivial stuff.  Right off the bat they email you a cut/pasted canned response saying I need to go to www.cisco.com/go/license, even though I've already stated in the case notes that I've done that.  Then they resend the bad license and send another generic email saying it's been issued and ask if they can close the case.

The worst is Unified Presence with CUWL.  Everytime I set this up I have to open a case to get the CUP server licenses correct.  They always tell me it's not included in the order.  (CUP comes packaged as a part of CUWL!!!)  We go round and round over email on this for days.

[James Hawkins]

I feel your pain.

My pet hate is CUWL upgrades which do not include PAK codes for server node licenses  - you are supposed to use your existing licenses.

Given that the vast majority of customers buying CUWL upgrade licenses are moving from CallManager 3 or 4 which did not have license files this is kind of difficult. I have spent literally weeks trying to explain this to the licensing and product management teams without receiving satisfactory responses.

On any UC project we typically waste several days trying to resolve license issues. With the new license enforcement for switches, routers etc. this is going to get worse.

If Cisco cannot introduce a sensible method of dealing with licenses we maybe forced to start looking at selling competitors products such as Shoretel or Microsoft.

[Anil Verma]

Thank you for providing us direct feedback about the licensing challenges you are facing. We understand the frustration and take this feedback seriously. In order to make things efficient for our customers and partners we are making changes to the way we license our products for future releases.

We have tried to articulate the current migration process from Unity 4.x and above to Unity Connection 8.x in a slide deck available here –
https://www.myciscocommunity.com/docs/DOC-23134

Also, we have a team that works on license migration questions and issues. The team can be reached at connectionmmigration@external.cisco.com .

If you have further questions or comments, please send an email to Rajiv Kapoor(rajkapoo@cisco.com ) or Anil Verma(anilve@cisco.com) and we will personally follow up with you.

Thanks

[Rob Huffman]

Hi Anil,

Thanks for your great response here

Is this doc for "Partners" only?? I can't seem to acess it even when logged in?

https://www.myciscocommunity.com/docs/DOC-23134

Cheers!

Rob

[ahochau_2]

Thanks Anil.  This information should be shared with the licensing team as well, because they don't seem to know any of this.  Logic dictates that if you have a question about licensing, you should contact the licensing team.

[j.huizinga]

Thanks Anil for the document!

This really helped.

Make sure TAC and licensing have this document also, because I am in contact with both of them and I am very unhappy

And in general licensing in Cisco is really complicated compared with other products we sell that need licensing.

And please don't license every bit and byte that Cisco produces,

JH

[Nicholas Wysocki]

I feel your pain. i just updated to 8.5 and i'm wanting to add only 20 user voice mail accounts. I received a quote for over $9000.00