Important Update about the Business Catalyst End of Life

[Mihai_Tica]

More than two weeks have passed since the End of Life Announcement for Business Catalyst. During this time we have listened to your feedback on a variety of channels in addition to speaking directly with our partners. Two pain points we’ve heard consistently are the timelines for closing down Business Catalyst along with the ability to upgrade trial sites to paid. Recognizing that these are challenges that many partners face, we have decided to modify our plans in order to ease your transition out of the Business Catalyst platform, as follows:

1. We are extending the End of Life timeline from 2 years to 3 years, with the end of life now scheduled for March 26th, 2021. We hope this additional year will give our valued customers and partners sufficient time to move clients to a different platform.
2. We are extending the ability to upgrade trial sites to paid until 8/27 (was 6/18). This new date provides you with 5 months past the End of Life Announcement to close all of your on-going projects.

Thank you providing your feedback and insight. We know this is a difficult transition and are committed to help you succeed in the effort to migrate your sites to new platforms.

[SarahSYS1]

This is a good step in the right direction. Thank you for listening to the community and acting on our concerns .

4 years would be better as from our experience sites have usually served their purpose by then.

Further to this, out of the 200 websites that we oversee there are a lot which happily look after themselves and do not require any kind of tech support.

The biggest issue we have is our biggest clients that have a lot of customer accounts on the website. With some of them we felt we had to stay with BC for the sole reason that we need to keep these usernames/passwords. Is there any way of retaining these for a migration to another platform?

[pChirita]

Hi Sarah,

At this moment, we cannot share items such as credit card payment tokens, user passwords, etc. without explicit end user consent (which defeats the whole purpose of exporting them). They represent highly sensitive information and are the property of the end user, not the property of the platform (Business Catalyst), nor the property of the service provider - so we, the platform, can only share this information with the end user, not with other parties.

We're working with our Legal department to see if there is any way around this, but in principle I don’t think we can share this information. We'll come back if we do.

Paul.

[JohnSSmith]

Putting this out there - Many partners paid cash to be able to sell BC - If enough partners were interested, would Adobe hand the whole thing over to a consortium of partners or is the environment changed so much, no one would be interested anyway?

[BCPARTNER]

When will Site Owners be contacted and informed of this decision?

Will you contact ALL Site Owners, or only those you bill directly?

Would you consider using the Partner Messaging System to allow us to append to that message?  In other words, your legal responsibility would be met with your notification, but we would have the opportunity to get out in front with our own message.  Doing so would help us control the fallout to both yours and our own organizations.

- Hanan

[pChirita]

Hi Hanan,

We will send an email campaign (only) to site owners that we bill directly on 5/21. We have to use the same channels & approach for these customers as we did for BC partners.

Cheers,

Paul.

[BCPARTNER]

Thank you, Paul.

[ryanh70531189]

When are you going to notify site owners? All the sites in our portal were set to "Invoice Client Only". They need to been informed by Adobe directly.

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Ryan,

See Paul's answer above: we will notify the site owners we bill directly (Invoice Customer Only & Invoice Partner 1st year / Customer Second year) on 5/21/2018)

Cristinel

[sce8spa]

Hi There, i am trying to log in and migrate my account but it says I have an invoice outstanding and it wont let me access the admin console to do the migration.  Obviously i dont want to pay for renewal for another year when i am going to migrate it.

I can't contact your support either as it needs me to log in to be able to contact them.

I have just spend 1 hour 30 mins talking to Adobe Billing support, but they are completely useless and telling me to restart the computer and try another browse..

Please can someone help.. pulling my hair out here!!

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Scott,

Your invoices seem at least a month overdue. You can go ahead and pay the yearly invoice and then request a refund for the remaining period once you move the site.

Cristinel

PS

I will delete the second post as duplicate

[sce8spa]

Thanks Christine, but its madness you are asking me to pay for a service which I will terminate within 1 hour hour after i download the data and move to another service!!!

[grayD0825]

I really wish Adobe would reconsider, there are hundreds of thousands of paid websites hosted on this platform. Are you really going to just throw that out the window and hand it over to other hosting platforms? Hmmm, just doesn't make much sense to me.

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Dawn,

As difficult as it is, the decision to EOL BC is final and will not be changed.

Cristinel

[tredpro]

Im getting this     "This site license is no longer valid and needs to be upgraded to a Business Catalyst subscription."             when i log in. any help? support sent me here

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi,

Business Catalyst free sites have been removed from the Creative Cloud subscription in 2015 (Creative Cloud and Business Catalyst | Creative Cloud blog by Adobe ).

The subscriptions purchased prior to the date of removal kept their free sites for as long a the subscription remainedunchanged. Any update of your pre-2015 subscription like cancel or change to another plan (upgrade to another package, change billing frequency) leads to removal of the free sites from Business Catalyst.

In such event, the system will consider the sites unpaid and suggest an upgrade to a current BC paid plan so that you can keep the site live. So you receive such an email, please open a support case so that we can analyse your subscription status and work on a solution for your live sites.

Cristinel

[tredpro]

Could you provide me a link for where to open a support ticket regarding

This? I had trouble finding the proper location thatched an option for this

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 3:25 AM cristinel@adobe <forums_noreply@adobe.com>

[cristinel@adobe]

You can open a case here if you're not logged in:

Adobe Business Catalyst - Contact

[C9-MB]

> 2. We are extending the ability to upgrade trial sites to paid until 8/27 (was 6/18). This new date provides you with 5 months past the End of Life Announcement to close all of your on-going projects.

However, the ability to create trial sites appears to have been removed on 6/18 ?

Certainly, I just went to spin up a final test for a client and now find that the option is missing  ?

[cristinel@adobe]

Hi Mike,

The ability to create new trial sites has been removed on 6/18 (see release notes) as per the BC EOL calendar.

Cristinel

[bri-idea]

I would like to know whats to come of the commissions I never received from selling BC as a "partner"

[cristinel@adobe]

We have lowered the commissions redeem limit to $100 and looking to further lower that in the future. So, if you have accrued more than $100 in commissions, you can redeem them at any time from your parter portal.

[danielingberman]

I have several free sites on Business Catalyst since I've subscribed to Creative Cloud since 2013.

Last month I found that they had been turned off.  For some unknown reason.  Your tech support restored them.

Now I see that all my sites are set to expire in a couple of days.  But BC EOL is 2021, so why is this happening?  And, I see no way to change this.

To make it worse I've tried to contact support through the portal.  Apparently my emails are getting rejected.  And chat seems to be disabled.

What is going on here?   Are you trying to force me to give up my free sites by just expiring them? 

PLEASE RESPOND.  You've set my sites to expire in 3 days.

[C9-MB]

If by 'free' sites, you mean 'trial' sites expiring after not being accessed for a while, then try changing the Template setting to Private if it's not otherwise being used.

[danielingberman]

Thanks.

By "free sites" I mean the 5 sites that came with my Creative Cloud subscription (I've been here since 2013).  These sites have been active for years.

Yet now they are set to expire.