How Do You Manage Milestone Care Pack Licenses?

I typically put these in my calendar and have a notice popup 60 days out then 30 days out then the day of. This makes it easier to do and then your not scrambling so close to when they expire. With that said it's still not easy either. Also make sure you use a PO when ordering the licenses that way you can keep track of it all. Hopefully. 

This client has licenses expiring at different dates due to when we installed the project. So I had them all run for 1 year and xx days to get them all expiring on 12/31/2019.

I think for all future VMS projects I am going to have them run a year and xx days to expire on 12/31. That way every year we deal with it once for all clients.

Milestone licensing ......yeah.

It's frustrating. We have a system set up to automatically generate an invoice for each Milestone customer once a year. It generates 90 days before the care expires. That gives us time to review the invoice, compare the camera counts in case they have added cameras, send to the customer and then wait for payment. 

That being said, recently we had a case where Milestone kicked back a PO we sent to our vendor saying we weren't ordering enough care for all the cameras on the system even though we had ordered one year for all cameras on the system. The system wasn't expired, but since the expiration date was further than a year in the future, they said the amount of care ordered wasn't enough to cover all the cameras. Somehow we had gotten the care coverage to far into the future even though we only ever ordered 1 year for each camera added.

From what I recall, adding 1 year of care coverage to the current camera count would some how roll back care coverage on all cameras. Its bizarre. and as I try to recount I still don't understand what happened. They said we needed to order not only one year of care, but add several hundred days of daily coverage to balance it. We got Milestone to make an exception and allow us to add the care as we ordered and have since started waiting until the week the care coverage expires to place the PO with our vendor. 

The anecdote above may have been a one off, but my point is Milestone licensing is not simple at all. 

It’s been a while since I sold Milestone but they use to have a Milestone Dashboard associated with your SLCs that displayed the expiration date easily.  I always used that to verify when SUPs were expiring.  I have to believe the dashboard has only been enhanced in the past 3 years.

As for purchasing them the process was always a challenge particularly when past the date of expiration.  They really need to bypass distribution as it just adds another layer of complexity to a primarily software company.

Kudos to Milestone for reaching out to me regarding this and helping me sort some items on the dashboard etc.

I guess it is good not to post UD.