Bob,
This is David and I feel like I have a hand in this debacle. When you were asking about deployment issue which is a purely technical issue I saw the other question from MapSuiteDev who is another user, see quote below on the same thread. For some reason I misread who said what and told Ben, who isn't in sales and doesn't know about our product licensing in detail to hand you over to sales for a detailed response. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought you would think I would think you were violating our license. What sales should have done was to call you to explain what was going on. Instead they posted on the discussion forum, which is a first in ThinkGeo history I think, and I didn't expect that. Just like a person coming late into the conversation they didn't know what was exactly going on. On the discussion forums usually it one person on a thread and we got tripped up this time.
Quote from MapSuiteDev
>>This means a license fee is needed for every server you want to run MapSuite on ?
>>This is doesn't sounds right.
On the customer portal we have a different group of people answering those questions because we don't want one support method to suffer versus another. We also have a system to know if the people who post on the discussion forums are customers and we prioritize accordingly. Typically what we see is the more general and easies questions posted to the discussion forums and the tickets are used for tough questions that take longer. In any event I am going to rattle some cages on my end to see what the heck is going on.
What we should have done is I should have read the posts more throughly, given Ben better instructions. Then I should have called sales and asked them to give you a call, they are supposed to like making calls. Sorry for the screwup.
On another note we are going to make server licensing a lot easier in the near future. The licensing tool will hookup to us over the internet so you can see you number of licenses and then deploy without having to go through all the bother. Of course we didn't think much about production deployments as we are in beta but as always assumptions come back to bite us. One more note on that is that you should be able to deploy you application to something like QA or some internal sites without even licensing it. You will get a watermark “Unlicensed” but QA or internal folks might not care.
In any event keep posting you questions and we will do our best to answer them.
David