Land F/X Scope of Support

This article covers the extent and limitations of technical support offered by Land F/X for our software products.

Land F/X will provide expert-level troubleshooting, recommendations, and diagnosis (where applicable) in response to the following types of issues and questions brought to our attention by Land F/X clients who are current in their yearly renewal status.

• Updates: Includes generally commercially available code corrections, patches, new or enhanced features, and minor version releases of Land F/X software as denoted by a change in the number to the left and/or right of the decimal in the version number.

• Installation: Includes troubleshooting and diagnosis assistance provided to customers who are downloading and installing, or upgrading Land F/X software.

• Configuration: Includes troubleshooting configuration settings for existing installations, on approved computer and network setups, to ensure proper operation and functionality.

• Usage: Our designated usage technicians will answer your "how to" questions related to the standard and intended operation of our software.

• Bug Identification and Correction: Includes the investigation, verification, and repair of issues that we determine have resulted from errors or flaws in our software code. More info on bug identification and correction

• Feature Requests / Wish List Submissions: Land F/X users who are current on their renewals are free and encouraged to provide suggestions for features or capabilities to be made available in future versions. We reserve the right to vet and prioritize said suggestions. 

Versions of supported products covered by Land F/X support

• Supported Versions of our Plugins: Our support extends to the most recent version of the software. If we need to produce a patch or other remedy, it will pertain to the most recent codebase only. If you are using a previous version of the plugin and experiencing an issue, we will first ask you to update to the latest version. If you are using an older version due to an unsupported version of AutoCAD, or to avoid a feature change with the latest version, we cannot offer custom support for your issue. We will address it via the current codebase, and get you upgraded to the most recent version. Along those lines, users who are experiencing a bug with their current version of the software that is preventing them from performing any particular aspect of the software, yet have not paid to continue their support, will not receive custom support or a bug fix for free. Those services are reserved for those who remain current on their renewals.

• Supported Versions of AutoCAD and F/X CAD: Land F/X will provide support only for versions of AutoCAD and F/X CAD listed as supported versions on our System Requirements Page or as specified at the time of purchase. Changes to supported versions will be announced in advance on our website and via our newsletter notifications.

• Environments Supported: Land F/X supports use of our products only on the platforms (hardware and operating systems) specified on our System Requirements Page.

Personalized training

We offer personalized training sessions for the standard usage of our software upon request. The personalized training costs are: $450 per 1-hour session, or $350 per 1-hour session for clients who order 2 or more sessions. We do not offer personalized training sessions longer than 1 hour.

F/X CAD issues & reinstallation

We only support the 5 most recent versions of F/X CAD. Please note that our support does not include a guarantee that the version of F/X CAD you want to install will install correctly on your combination of hardware and Windows operating system. If you are unable to install or reinstall any version of F/X CAD, or are unable to address Fatal Error messages or other errors, we may have no other recourse than to recommend a complete reinstall of Windows and will likely recommend upgrading to the most recent version of F/X CAD.

In short, you may need to upgrade hardware, reinstall Windows, upgrade to the latest version of F/X CAD, or even all three.

What level of support will be provided for discontinued versions of CAD?

• Discontinued versions of CAD currently include {jumi [*127]} and older.
• The latest versions of Land F/X will not work in any discontinued versions of CAD.
• As we do not maintain an archived library of legacy Land F/X versions, we cannot provide a method to perform a new installation to function with any discontinued versions of CAD.
• If an office has a Multi-User Land F/X environment with a mixed fleet of year versions of CAD (i.e., some discontinued and some newer versions), if a user with a newer version of CAD updates Land F/X, it will break functionality for the users of the discontinued version. We cannot provide a legacy version of Land F/X to correct this issue.

Infection detected! error message & drawing cleanup

If a Land F/X user sees the Infection detected! error message showing a quantity of corrupt objects and stating that Land F/X has detected a virus-like contamination in the drawing file currently open, Land F/X will not provide technical support for that file for any reason other than cleaning the file. The presence of this dialog box serves as notice that the user has been warned of corruption in the file and may not send the file to us for technical support.

The user can click the Autodesk RegApp Cleanup Utility link in the error message to clean the file and address the corruption. Our team will provide support related to cleaning the file to eliminate corruption if necessary but will not address any additional issues in the file until it has been cleaned.

What support includes

The following items are included in Land F/X support obligations:

• MySQL troubleshooting and diagnosis
• Installation support/troubleshooting/guidance for Land F/X software
• Upgrade support/troubleshooting/guidance for the standard and intended usage of Land F/X software
• Customization, integration, and issues arising from standard usage of Land F/X software
• Documentation on general usage of our software
• Knowledge Base articles for addressing issues or errors related to Land F/X
• Brief Trainer and Power Tip videos
• One-hour webinars
• Answering questions and troubleshooting issues directly pertaining to the administrative, planting, site & hardscape design, details, and irrigation functions of our software
• Functionality of F/X CAD and our AutoCAD and SketchUp Plugins

What support excludes

The following items are excluded from Land F/X support obligations:

• Processes or troubleshooting steps covered in Land F/X documentation and Knowledge Base articles, training videos, and/or other training and troubleshooting materials provided on our website.
• Land F/X software that is used on or in conjunction with hardware or software other than that specified in our System Requirements Page and Install Guide
• Virus infections/diagnosis/maintenance
• Spam protection/diagnosis/maintenance
• Management of your system/server/network
• Routine product maintenance (data backup, cleaning disk space, network changes)
• MySQL database troubleshooting beyond the basic steps outlined in our Knowledge Base
• 3rd-party applications not provided by Land F/X
• Altered/modified/pirated versions of the Land F/X software
• Defects in Land F/X software resulting from hardware malfunction, abuse or, improper use
• Any version of Land F/X software for which support services have been discontinued by Land F/X as documented on our System Requirements Page
• Reimbursement and expenses spent for services not provided by Land F/X
• Training, customization, integration, and any issues arising from non-standard usage of the software
• Evaluation software or other software provided by third parties
• Network issues, including but not limited to: permissions issues, drive mapping, IP address change, IP address conflicts, DNS resolution, IPv6 DNS resolution, router configuration, NAS configuration
• Technical support for any issues other than drawing corruption and cleanup in files that trigger the Infection detected! error message. More information

In cases listed above, we will do our best to diagnose the issue. But we do not offer free repair of these issues (which by definition would require a remote session). Based on our experience maintaining a small office with Windows computers, we recognize that certain issues may require hardware replacement or the reinstallation of Windows. More importantly, however, these issues require a competent and professional IT administration. Where possible, we are happy to provide that professional IT support – albeit for a modest and competitive $150 fee.

It is important to note that our team has a strong background in system administration, with several of our staff having provided IT services to small offices for many years. Drawing from this base of experience, we will, with all confidence of experience, state that the best resolution for some installation problems requires a clean install of Windows. A resolution may include even worse news: that a machine simply has to be replaced. Users who do not want to spend money on upgrading F/X CAD, or reinstalling Windows, or buying a new computer, do so at their own risk. We reserve the right to decline requests that we provide complete support to make an outdated or improperly configured network or computer work with software we distribute. In these cases, we will diagnose the problem. In most instances – even for the issues outside our scope – we can offer paid support for resolution. See Extended Support Fee below.

Extended support fee

Our team is happy to provide unlimited technical support by phone or email for issues directly related to our software. However, many technical issues stem from improperly maintained Windows installations, outdated or improperly configured equipment, or network problems. These deeper-seated issues go above and beyond the support our team is able to provide as part of the purchase and renewal or upgrade of our software. As a result, these types of issues may necessitate a per-incident hourly support charge of $150. If an incident requires more than an hour of support, the $150 hourly fee shall be applied to each hour or portion of an hour of additional support for that incident. Rather than incurring these types of charges – and risking potentially catastrophic computer issues – we encourage you to pay this money proactively by hiring a qualified IT professional to service your office computers regularly.

Identification and correction of bugs

Note that instances when the software does not do what you think it should, or are trying to do, do not constitute "bugs." In addition, the nature of structuring source code can result in allowing an "error" to occur in instances, rather than "trapping" every possible instance. Common examples include attempts to:

• Place plants in Paper Space and then label those plants
• Place plants along a 3D vertical wall within Model Space

In both examples, the hypothetical user attempting these actions would be well beyond what the software was designed for, and will undoubtedly encounter "errors."

Another example: Our placing of sprinklers uses a highly custom mouse input routine that does not support the standard Object Snap (OSNAP) modes. This exclusion is, by our account, not a "bug." It is in fact a very challenging and time-consuming feat to differentiate bug reports from feature requests. As with the rest of this document, we have found the need to define these terms explicitly, due to past experiences. Suffice it to say that if a user labels something a "bug," we will not necessarily make the same determination, or priority for fixing.

That all being said, all traditionally defined bugs in the software (variables out of scope, typos in the code, misused variables, lack of normalization or evolution of data object support, realistic scenario error handling, errant data scenarios, runaway loops, excessive processor utilization, repeated database queries, and so on) have error handling that sends us the error report immediately. Our development team immediately investigates the resulting error reports and, where applicable, implements bug fixes without delay. (Incidentally, our record for time elapsed between error report, bug fix, code recompiled, and update posted is less than 2 minutes.)