Can we help you purchase more software?
As I mention in a previous post we are using Campfire a lot these days. I just asked Doc to add an account for our Dovetail to Campfire integration and it caused us to brush up against our user limit. Campfire lets you know this in a non-invasive and graceful way.
As an administrator you may not like the idea of all your users seeing a message like this. But it works. Users know to expect issues if more people login and they can email the application administrator if necessary. Also making this limitation visible likely helps Campfire sell more software.
At Dovetail Software our user licensing has the idea of a grace license limit. If you hit your user limit on Dovetail CRM we can allow a few more users into the system so that you have time to contact us to purchase more licenses. We have a solution in our knowledge base on How to setup an email notification when license limits are near.
To: dovetail-crm-admin@company.com
Subject: Message from Dovetail CRM :: You have hit your license limit
Body:
You have hit your license limit.
Date: 1/1/2008
Server: dovetail-crm
Error: Grace license reserved for Dovetail SDK
I think we can do better with our notifications by making them work out of the box and to provide, like campfire, feedback to users logging into the system. Anything that helps degrade service gracefully and set user expectations will help us sell more software.
Anything is better than something like this (which has happened to me at the worst possible momment):
Sorry, you cannot use your own software or try to fix that important problem with the server. Have a nice day! This does not make me want to buy more software.
