No worries I think, I'll just call Milestone tech support like usual, but this time they tell me that they can't help me, and that I need to get support from the place where I bought their product in the first place.

As you can probably imagine, The licensing for my cameras broke with the upgrade and now I can only use one camera. It's all there on the Milestone website, and they are urging me to do it, so I download and perform the upgrade. It was nearing time for me to renew my SUP and I wanted to purchase licensing for more cameras, so I logged into my account on the Milestone website and see that Milestone Xprotect Essentials is now their free product, and since I have a paid version with an active SUP I get to upgrade to Milestone Xprotect Express for free! That is until I found that things had changed when I needed them in late 2016. No worries though, a quick call to Milestone tech support and they would reset the licensing information so I could re-activate my install and I was back up and running.

No matter how closely I followed their directions, more often than not the product licensing would get screwed up almost every time I made a major change like that. Over the years I upgraded the Milestone software version several times, and replaced the server hardware a couple of times.

It really is great software and things were good for the most part while I used it I tried Milestone Xprotect Go and was really impressed with it, so I bought Xprotect Essentials and licensing for 4 cameras total, as well as their SUP (Software Upgrade Plan) for 5 years. In early 2012 I began replacing those one by one with IP cameras, and after trying several free VMS products I decided to purchase Milestone Xprotect because I wasn't happy with any of the free ones I had tried. In the beginning I had four analog cameras and the video from them was recorded on a DVR appliance.

I've tried several VMS products running on Microsoft Windows over the years, some good and some not so good. A little history and why I'm glad I found Genius Vision

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