 Tom here from Orange Systems and I have in my hands a Unify Cloud Key Gen 2 plus and I've reviewed this before But that review is now inaccurate because Unify made some changes now They've added some things but they've also taken away and that's what I want to talk about is well We'll start with the good news of what they added which was the talk and access and LED controls are now available in there And I thought when I reviewed the Unify access system It was odd that you would only put it in the Dream Machine Pro. So they've corrected that. Thank you But here is where the problems come in and it starts in the 2024 firmware now roll forward a little bit The 2026 firmware is what's available now and my cloud key is running 2026 so that's the latest as of January 23rd 2021 latest non beta firmware available and 2024 though is where the major changes were made and it's this whole centralized user access management single sign on to all controllers single remote connection to the new cloud portal and Easy installation and management from different apps Controllers it's the way they tie it to the cloud dashboard and that is exactly where the problem is in my opinion They have decided that this will not set up without an internet access or a Unify account And I have a feeling a lot of people in the Unify community Well, they may have some concern over that because if Unify ever decides to discontinue this product Is their will to do so or not is completely gonna be up to them. We don't know They don't give us a roadmap for what is end-to-life necessarily on everything they do So if they decide to discontinue this product then you can't activate it anymore because it requires a cloud account and requires the internet to get set up and although you can once you've activated online and local users for management It's so concerning that this can't be reset back up without an internet connection and tying to the Unify cloud system So that is a problem. The next problem is they removed the ability to do multi-site hosting So if we look inside of here normally you'd be able to see what site we're on and add another site Now this was a feature It's had for a long time and we have a few clients that were using this to host maybe a couple small offices Where they only have a few devices. There is certainly a device limitation. These are not Designed to handle high heavy load of a very large install of a Unify site But they will handle a couple different sites with a few different devices on there such as a Wi-Fi access point at each one of these small offices And now the good news is if you upgrade it you get to keep those sites But you can't add any more and we reset up ours as a in our lab here Well kind of as a demo and confirmed Yeah, once you set this up there is no ability to add other sites kind of of note with the 6043 version that is on here We noticed and our self-hosted it also is suggesting the best experience Would come from buying a dream machine which I thought was kind of odd when we add new sites So it's still available in 6043 if you're using the self-hosted version or in the case of Riley Chase and hostify He still offers it and hostify is actually where I was having a discussion about this and Riley pointed out that It's now recommending this since 6043 and I'm like, huh, that's interesting I looked and he is absolutely correct when I add a new site to the 6043 controller. It suggests a dream machine back over to the Cloud key It's kind of a confusing thing that unify would remove a feature that was kind of a selling point And I think something people liked if you especially if you for example, I'm not a fan of them I've made this very clear But if you're using their unify routing equipment to me the unify routing equipment is very very limited But it did have one cool feature if you took two different sites and you put them on one controller such as a cloud key It would make it really easy for you to create a VPN between them So you would go to the two sites and you'd say VPN from site a to site B That was actually one cool feature that was just great I thought you know it made it easy for people who go I don't care that the Unify routing equipment has a lot of limitations and is very very basic in terms of functionality But it did have the ability to at least go to site to site VPN and create them like Very easy in a menu by clicking a couple buttons as opposed to a little bit more complex setup that you traditionally find when doing site to site VPNs It would just map everything for you Well, you've now removed that feature and that particular client we're talking about that's what they do they only need the most basic of routing functions, but they did have their sites tied together and Now they can't do it on a cloud key So now they have to find a hosting solution either a hosting a server themselves of a self-hosted controller or B As I had mentioned I've reviewed hostify on this channel And I've always saw them Riley and the team over there is a great tool I guess they're gonna buy hostify subscription So good for Riley bad for unify because their plan is not to go buy a few more cloud keys Because they feel kind of betrayed because the cloud key lost a feature that they weren't used to use in But I want to bring this information out there and just share it with the crowd Let me know what you think down below Let me know what you think over in our forums if you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this But I just want to bring this up because I thought this was kind of a weird move on unifies part to just Yank these features out of the unify the ability to set it up offline, which I almost was like Weirded out a little bit when people started saying I can't set my cloud key offline like you said in your previous video I'm like why not I thought the user might have been having a problem So we did confirm by mastery setting that's a problem and the when someone says I can't figure out how to add another site Which was our client. We're like, what do you mean? You can't add on our site and yeah, these types of surprises I don't think users really like but like I said, leave some comments below Share your thoughts and share your thoughts with the unified to if you want to reach out to them Maybe they can do some clarification for how all of these things work or why they made these changes I certainly don't have any insight into why they did it Best guest would be is that they want to sell more cloud keys and set one up for every single site But that's not a solution that fits for everyone And when you used to sell a product that changed without a product name change or anything like that The product you have got a firmware update and lost features That's generally enough to enrage a lot of people in the community that bought it for a reason and now lost some of Those features and I don't know that just doesn't sit well with me Let me know what you think down below. Thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to Lawrence systems calm fill out our contact page and Let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums dot Lawrence systems calm Or we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again, thanks for watching and see you next time