Autodesk is in the middle of a big site overhaul at the moment, with many services unavailable. For example, attempting to log into Subscription Support gives me this:
The Subscription Center is currently undergoing maintenance. You will not be able to access the Subscription Center during this time.
Support Request is also undergoing maintenance. Currently, you are not be able to submit, view or manage settings for your Support Requests.The Subscription Center and Support Request will become available at the date and time shown in the chart below.
Time Zone/Country Date Time
GMT Tuesday, September 23, 2008 5.00 am
Eastern Time (EST) Tuesday, Spetember 23, 2008 1.00 am
Central European Time (CET) Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7.00 am
Japan Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:00 pm
Korea Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:00 pm
Singapore Tuesday, September 23, 2008 1.00 pm
India – Bangalore Tuesday, September 23, 2008 10.30 amWe appreciate your patience while we work to improve Autodesk Subscription.
That’s a relatively useful message; some direct links I have bookmarked give me this kind of thing:
The server you are trying to access is either busy or experiencing difficulties. Please close the Web browser, open a new browser window, and try logging in again.[05:09:00]
This also means your resellers are unable to provide you with license codes until the server is back up again. So if you were going to rely on that, don’t.
The various Autodesk blogs seem to be unaffected at the moment, but links on those blogs may not work correctly. For example, signing up to be placed on the AU blogroll from the link at Between The Lines seems to work, but then right at the end gives me the message below, leaving me in the dark about whether I need to repeat the process at a later date:
Temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance.
This portion of the Autodesk website is temporarily unavailable while we complete some upgrades. Our apologies for this, unfortunately necessary, interruption.
Autodesk is working to consolidate multiple user accounts, simplify the sign in process, and provide a single User ID and Password for accessing several Autodesk web sites. Access to register or edit your existing account information will be restricted during the September 18-21 launch window. Additionally, the sites affected will be unavailable Monday, September 22.
This particular message also provides this handy list of sites affected:
- Autodesk Subscription
- Product Activation
- Autodesk Discussion Groups
- Autodesk University
- Autodesk Labs
- Alias Design Community
- Civil Engineering Community
- Impression Community
- Manufacturing Community
Here’s hoping autodesk.com comes back to life on time, in full working order, with a minimum of broken links (the biggest bane of the last overhaul), and hopefully with useful improvements that make it all worthwhile.
Most of the Autodesk blogs work because many are hosted on TypePad. If you had any problems with them it was because TypePad were also doing system upgrades over the weekend. Must be the season!
I was able to log into the Subscription site just fine, and just when I was about to say “Wow, this is working flawlessly…”, I get this –> “We have detected that you are using a browser that is not currently supported or has known issues with some features within Subscription Center web site. In order to access all of the Subscription Center features, we recommend that you use Microsoft Internet Explorer.”
Good grief…
Hmm, nice “improvement” there. My site stats show that only 59% of visitors here are using IE, and that’s been dropping about 1% a month.
Steve, RK – Firefox compatibility was a major part of the update work. I’d say somebody missed one or two calls to the browser check function.
Meanwhile, the page you saw has a link near the bottom, where you can tell Firefox to just go on in anyway. I’ve used the link a number of times and the subsequent pages worked fine.
But wait, there’s more!
If you log in to subscription within the next 10 minutes, you’ll get a FREE “The page you requested could not be found” message. Log in twice, with TWO browsers, and we’ll double the value and give you two 404 errors.
~ seeing if the wording will make your spam filter hiccup ~