Stupid decision that has pissed off loyal customers and lost OPS a lot of good-will
I am a Microsoft Partner and SharePoint consultant, supporting many clients with Office 365 SharePoint and an evangelist for your product, spruiking it everywhere I go. We have many clients on the Lite version.
One comment I have is the very stupid decision to force the full product on customers. I had a number of clients on version 6 Lite/OPM. 6 stopped working and forced customers to install the full version of 7. Now, 30 days later, the trial period has expired we are having to uninstall the full version of 7 and reinstall the Lite version of 7. This has been an enormous amount of work for an administrator, to log on to each PC individually and perform installs/uninstalls.
I understand the motivation of showcasing the full product - but not this way. This was a very poor decision and has caused loyal customers to be extremely pissed off. I have many angry clients who are questioning the IT expense of continual install and uninstall and we have definitely lost all the good-will toward the One Place product suite.
M
shared this idea
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James Fox
commented
Thank you for your feedback. We will take this on-board.
As at Release 7.x we’ve re-branded and launched two additional products as part of the OnePlace Solutions suite of products. In addition to OnePlaceMail we also now have OnePlaceDocs and OnePlaceLive. When launching R7.1, we reintroduced the free offering (previously known as OnePlaceMail Express on the R6.x platform) as OnePlaceMail Lite. This is a cut-down version of OnePlaceMail and provides a great amount of capability at a zero license fee. We’ve provided a 100% free offering now since July 2011 and are proud to support many organisations who don’t have a budget to procure the paid release but enjoy the benefits offered on the free version.
Now that we have a broader product mix, and intent on keeping a free Lite version of OnePlaceMail in the market, we wanted to ensure all customers experience and understand the full edition (including OnePlaceMail, OnePlaceDocs, OnePlaceLive) prior to using OnePlaceMail Lite. We found many customers using the previous Express edition were not aware of the greater capabilities of the full product and the risk of this is even more so with the three products now on offer.
On completion of the 30-day free trial, all customers will have the option to downgrade to OnePlaceMail Lite, extend the trial (on discussion re: your project timeline), uninstall or purchase licenses. We understand it will be a pain for some customers to uninstall and reinstall but felt it was a small price to pay for the capabilities provided in the free offering. Obviously in the paid release we don’t enforce updates or have other restriction which are part of the free offering.
Note: A user can move from OnePlaceMail Lite 7.x to the next OnePlaceMail Lite point release directly (not needing to go through the full product evaluation process as per the first process).
Please let us know if you can suggest a way we can change the process to meet both our business objectives and also keep OnePlaceMail Lite free and valuable to our clients. Again, thank you for voicing your opinion - we would like to hear from others on this forum and will also canvas other opinions outside the forum.
Kind Regards,
James