Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do I place an order?

   Please email us at info@orbeon.com with the number and type (Basic, Silver, Gold) of licenses you need. And let us know if you need a quote before ordering or if you have any other questions. Payments can be made by bank transfer or credit card via PayPal. If you choose to use PayPal, their processing fee is 2.9% for US cards and 4.4% for non-US cards.

2. We have 1 Dev, 1 Staging, and 1 Production servers; which subscriptions should we get?

   For your Dev, QA, or Staging servers (i.e. not for production environments), you can get a PE Basic. For your production server, you can get either a PE Silver or PE Gold. So, you can either get 2 PE Basic + 1 PE Silver, or 2 PE Basic + 1 PE Gold.

3. Subscriptions are per server; what do you mean by "server"?

   We mean "physical hardware machine". This way, should it make sense in your situation, you can run multiple instances of Orbeon Forms on the same machine with just one PE subscription, whether those instances run side-by-side hosted by one application server, on different JVMs, or even on different virtual machines. For cloud environments where you pay per VM, and are not sure whether two VMs are running on the same hardware, you need one subscription per VM. We use the term "server" to qualify the "physical hardware machine" on which you run Orbeon Forms, but it can certainly be a "desktop" or even "laptop", in particular for Dev environments.

4. Which version of Orbeon Forms are PE subscriptions for?

   The license you get with your subscription works on any version of Orbeon Forms released before the end of the subscription.

5. Do I need to purchase subscriptions for my backup servers?

   You don’t, as long as those are truly backup servers, that is: as long as the servers are not accessed by users, and if they were, it would be because another server for which you have a PE subscription went down.

6. What is the difference between "incidents" and "technical assistance"?

   An incident is a reproducible technical problem that you find with Orbeon Forms, that cannot be reasonably subdivided, that is not overly broad in scope. Orbeon engineers will investigate the incidents you report. If an incident is caused by a bug in Orbeon Forms, it will be entered in Orbeon's web-based tracking system. Technical assistance is for any other question or issue that are not caused by a bug in Orbeon Forms. This includes performance issues, forms troubleshooting, or architectural advice. Because activities in this category are labor-intensive and open-ended, PE subscriptions have a cap on the number of hours of Technical Assistance. If you are looking for more hours, see our Development Support subscriptions.

7. What is "bug priority escalation"?

   This ensures that bugs related to an incident you report are assigned a higher priority than bugs reported through other means, and so will be fixed earlier.

8. How fast do you respond to support inquiries?

   We check support inquiries during office hours (California time, namely PST/PDT) Monday to Friday, except US holidays. Our typical response time is 1 business-day for customers with PE Basic or PE Silver, and 4 business-hours for customers with PE Gold subscriptions.

9. How often do you release new versions of Orbeon Forms?

   See our release strategy.

10. For how long do you support any given version of Orbeon Forms?

    Each major release is supported for a period of 3 year from its initial release, and for every supported major release, only the latest point release is supported. For instance, Orbeon Forms 2019.2 was initially released on December 30, 2019, so 2019.2.x will be supported until December 29, 2022; and during that period, at any given point in time, only the latest 2019.2.x release is supported. You can find the release date for major releases in the release history.

11. Can I have a free development license for Orbeon Forms PE?

    Yes, if you need a license to be used on a developer's laptop or workstation, you can use a free trial license, as long as the instance of Orbeon Forms running on that machine will only be accessed locally and for development purposes. Trial licenses are valid for 90 days, so you'll need to get a new trial license every 3 months, but this is a fully automated procedure you can go through in a matter of minutes, and we don't limit you on the number of trial licenses you get.

    However, if you'd like to get support from Orbeon, or to run Orbeon Forms PE on a development server accessed by several users, then you need to get a PE Basic subscription.