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Forum thread: Says Trial limit been reached
| Melanie Monro 16 October 2014 18:14 |
Ive tried to log in to the teacher login today and on my pc its says: STEARsoft: Trial expired The trial limit has been reached. Please login to the administrator account to purchase a license to continue using STEARsoft. Licenses are not expensive, being charged on a yearly basis. You can ask your school to fund this as a resource (in the same way it would pay for an attendance book for you). I have literally only downloaded it about a week agoand just getting into trying to use it nd see if its something I want to buy a license for. I thought the trial was for 3 months? |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 16 October 2014 21:15 |
Dear Melanie, Thank you for your post. I'm sorry, but you've been a little misled. There are other limits on the trial too in terms of usage (in particular no more than 50 attendance sessions). Full details are at: http://www.stearsoft.co.uk/comparelicenses.php If you're willing to tell me where you picked up the 3-month limit without reference to the other information, I'd be grateful so I can update it to stop others picking up the same misunderstanding. If you're not synchronising with an iPhone or iPad, you could switch to a school deployment (in the administrator screen) to increase some of these limits as detailed in the comparelicenses page. Yours, Marcus |
| Melanie Monro 16 October 2014 21:24 |
I took the information from the website: http://www.stearsoft.co.uk/comparelicenses.php I note it says you can only have 50 attendance sessions and so only put in a month of sessions to stay under 50 sessions so we could see how it worked. Ive just put in the data for the first week of sessions and suddenly its locked me out of the trial altogether. I cant get in to see how the data looks or how i can interact with it. Ive only put in data for 1 week, that's 8 sessions. To be honest nowhere does it say on the page that that will happen. Or im totally misunderstanding the page. But im not sure how locking you out as soon as you put data in is at all helpful to see if a piece of software would work for someone. I have to say i'm disappointed. As basically i know have to decide to buy it to see if it works and risk losing that money if it doesn't work. Mel |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 17 October 2014 10:43 |
Melanie, OK, thank you for this. That shouldn't happen... With a trial license firstly, you'd get the full allocation shown on the comparelicenses page. Secondly, you'd be prevented from going over the limit, not just getting the bahviour you're seeing. I have 3 possible thoughts of how this might have happened: 1) Have you activated the Trial license (entering the customer ID and password in the administrator area) and pressing the 'Activate' button. 2) If you're using this with other teachers, maybe someone else has exceeded a limit. 3) If you've synchronised with a mobile device, extra data may have been entered via that route. If it's 1), then try activating the trial license. If it's 2), then if you're testing this in a school, multiple-user scenario, give me more details and I can perhaps arrange a more formal, less restricted trial. If it's 3), you can get under the limits using the mobile device and then synchronise. If it's none of these, then any ideas as to what you've done would be appreciated, as I agree that the experience you've had is not one that we intend. Yours, Marcus |
| Melanie Monro 17 October 2014 19:38 |
Hi, 1) I have definitely activated the license. 2) Im the only one using it at the moment and as im accessing whether its worth us buying it and using it. 3) I have sync with an ipad but all i did was add the attendance data to the few sessions we had last week to see how that works and then came in the pc to see what I could see of what i had editted so see how the software would work and it wont let me in. I presumed the attendence sessions allowed were up to 50 sessions (we had 8 last week which i filled in). Is it in fact 50 students so 50 actually ticking if they are there or not. Thats the only think i can think that might go over the limits/ But that seems ridiculous if you have a class of 25 students then two sessions and you are over the limit and that's hardly a chance to see if it works. Mel |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 17 October 2014 20:20 |
Hi Mel, It's not supposed to be that ridiculous :) Your presumtion was correct. With a class of 25, your 50 sessions would give you 1250 ticks. What data do you now have on the iPad? Is it just the one class with a few students? And how many sessions have you got (including blank ones with no attendance marked?) I think the issue is that empty sessions count towards the 50... My best guess is that you have the full version of the iPad App and have created lots of sessions in advance. These are counted towards the 50 limit (even if no attendance is marked). If this is the case, on your iPad go to the class and tap 'Edit' (in the top right corner). Tap 'Delete sessions', change the date to 1st October to be well within the 50 sessions. Synchronise, and hopefully that will get it working on the PC (having brought the number of sessions within the limit). If that shows this to be the issue, then you can carefully add sessions up to the 50. In fact if you add them on the PC, it will create up to the 50 without going over the limit. Yours, Marcus |
| Melanie Monro 17 October 2014 21:00 |
As far as im aware I created all the sessions on the pc and none on the Ipad (i remember reaching the 50 limit and stopping when it said I couldn't add more, as you say it doesn't lock you out then though just warns you which was fine), just synced them over when done so I could practise using that at do the register. But ive gone into the ipad and removed all sessions in November so literally only have October sessions. So that leaves 4 sessions every Tuesday and 4 sessions every Friday through October starting last week. So that is definitely under 50 sessions in total. Synced with PC again and still wont let me into the program from pc. Still saying same message as before. Mel |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 17 October 2014 21:47 |
Mel, I'm sharing your frustration. It should not be this annoying. Having ruled out quite a lot of things, I suspect switching to school deployment mode will let us possibly see what has gone wrong. Log in as administrator on the PC version, and on the left-hand menu select 'Switch to school deployment'. You don't need to go through the whole prompted setup screens, just click 'Exit' at the top of the left-hand menu and log in to your teacher account. I'm hoping (suspecting) you won't be over the 'school' trial limits so will be able to see your data. In particular check how many classes you have and click the 'List all students' option to check how many students there are. Being in school deployment mode, you won't be able to sync to your iPad, but hopefully we can spot what is wrong and then switch back to 'Individual deployment' afterwards. Yours, Marcus |
| Melanie Monro 17 October 2014 23:11 |
ok ive done the above and gone into school mode and it has let me in. ive gone into all students and removed a few as the only thing i could think of i had done other then put the registers in was i had added a few student). I then went back and put it into individual mode and its let me back in again! yeah! However i have checked the number of students and i only have 133 so im not sure what number it cut me off at, i only removed about 6, so maybe 135? i knew we couldn't be over 200 as we don't have that many people. mel |
| Marcus Butler (STEARsoft) 18 October 2014 08:35 |
Mel, Glad to hear of some progress. The number of students thing is a little complex. Have you picked up that students hang around in the system even when you delete them from a class? The 'purge old data...' option in the web interface helps tidy some of this up. If you REALLY want to see what is saved (it sounds like you're IT literate) then go to the data files: C:/Program files/STEARsoft/Reg/data Within the directory named by your teacher username, you'll find a db-pupil.csv file which you can open in a spreadsheet. That will tell you how many students STEARsoft thinks you have! Warning: Don't go editing these data files, odd things will happen if you don't know what you're doing; there are flags used for synchronisation that need to be correctly manipulated, and if the server is running, the 'live' data is stored in memory, which will probably overwrite any changes you'd make anyway... but it can be useful to view this data sometimes. Copying the files in this location effectively backs up all your data too :) Yours, Marcus |
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