College of Chemistry: ChemOffice+ Cloud site license

For many years, the College of Chemistry has paid for a UC Berkeley site license for ChemDraw Professional.
In 2021, we upgraded to ChemOffice+ Cloud with Signals Notebook Individual.
Note that we have licensed Signals Notebook Individual, not the Enterprise version (way more money).

ChemDrawPro is still the main desktop tool and ChemOffice+ adds some extra utilities and a plugin to interface with a cloud based E-Notebook called Signals Notebook Individual.

If you love ChemDrawPro as is and don't need Signals Notebook, then you can skip the steps about Signals Notebook and just use ChemDrawPro as a stand alone progam.

Compare the features of ChemOffice vs ChemDraw for Mac vs Windows (PDF).

Do not install ChemDrawPro/ChemOffice+ until you check the Operating System Requirements.

Next register using an @berkeley.edu email address at the site subscription page.

There are 2 registrations, one is to download ChemDraw/ChemOffice and one for the Signals Notebook Individual login.

You can input the same credentials for both if you wish but they are separate databases, so if you change the password on one, it does not affect the other.

If all you want is ChemDrawPro, you do not have to register for Signals Notebook. Just register to download the latest version of Chemdraw and then skip to our Download discussion.

Signals Notebook:

We have put this Signals Notebook discussion before the ChemDraw Download discussion but if you are not using Signals Notebook, skip ahead.

Once registered to access the Perkin Elmer Cloud applications, you will see 2 cloud tools:

To fully complete the registration, you must click on the link (in the purple shape above) "To access this subscription, Click here." You must click on that link once to activate the Signals Notebook registration.

In the future, you can access the Signals Notebook Login Page directly.

If you can't login at the Signals Notebook Login Page, the most common problem is that you failed to click on the link (in the purple shape above) to complete the registration.

Here is a YouTube Signals Notebook video.

Whether or not you use Signals Notebook, once you have registered for downloads, use the ChemDraw/ChemOffice Download login page. Look under Order History (screenshot) and click on the Order Number to see the Activation Code. You can find older versions of the software at this link too.

Here's an image of the recommended download components.
There is a Tips and Tricks zip file with gifs and short videos about ChemDraw and Signals Notebook.

For Mac, download the ChemDraw Professional installer dmg. Your extra ChemOffice components will be activated within ChemDrawPro.

For Windows, download the ChemOffice installer exe. The installer includes ChemDraw Professional and some utilities that include extra ChemOffice features.

Activate: The installation will request an activation code. This should have been emailed to you or you can check your order history.

Reactivate: The license expires every year at the end of May and must be renewed/reactivated. This might happen automatically. If not, you can reactivate for the next year by starting ChemDrawPro and clicking Activate Chemdraw from the Chemdraw menu and typing the new activation code (see above to look up your order history) in the popup.

Each berkeley.edu address can activate 2 copies of each version of the software. If you had to replace a laptop etc mid year and need a few more copies, email Perkin Elmer support.

Within Signals Notebook, click on the menu for your name and choose Get ChemOffice+ from the pulldown.

Download and run that installer. You may have a few steps here, including moving the web browser window to see the installer and signing in again.
Some versions of the installer give the wrong signin url as
https://mycompany.signalsnotebook.perkinelmer.cloud
and you have to replace the "mycompany" part so that it reads
https://chemdraweln.signalsnotebook.perkinelmer.cloud
On a mac, we found editing the url to be tricky but found we could copy/paste the correct url.

Be sure to give the plugin all needed permissions.

There is a second plugin for copy/paste from/to ChemDraw objects:

Click on the small icon in the lower left of the SN ChemDraw screen and follow the instructions.

Step 1. Download the installer (on Mac this is a dmg file; on Windows it is likely an exe or msi file).
Then run that installer. Make sure to actually install and not just download.

Step 2. Once the Step 1 installer actions were completed, we found step 2 to be a little tricky. We were using Firefox and we had Choose the Application to install the plugin (an xpi file). This is a different file from step 1! The step 2 file is an xpi format file.
We actually actually had to tell Firefox to Choose and then we browsed to identify the application as Firefox. Your browser may recognize this directly.

Group Computers: If you are the system administrator for a group of shared computers in a research lab (College of Chemistry only) or a teaching lab (any UC Berkeley), email us for a "lab" license. This is only for shared computers. Individuals should register individually for licenses for their own computers.

For 3D modeling analogous to Chem3D on a Mac, we recommend Avogadro.

People on berkeley.edu networks (eduroam, UCB VPN, campus wired connections etc) can download the ChemDraw JS toolkit.

If you are upgrading from an old version of ChemDraw, ChemOffice or related products, you should fully uninstall the prior version first. For new versions, the installer will usually advise you if this is needed.

Our site license will not activate any Chemdraw version that did not come from our site license, such as a version of Chemdraw you had at another university or a version downloaded from some other link on the Cambridesoft website.

The College of Chemistry has no IT staff and there are more than a 1000 users of this software. Troubleshoot using the tips here. Verify your machine meets the operating system requirements linked above. To access FAQs, articles, support forums or submit a help request, go to Perkin Elmer support.

If you have further questions, email us.

Please include:
1) Your full name. Are you grad/undergrad/postdoc/staff/faculty? What is your department (Chemistry, MCB etc)? Support is very limited, especially for non College of Chemistry people.
2) What is the berkeley.edu email address for your Cambridgesoft account?
3) Did you login to Perkin Elmer and check your records?
4) Did you check the operating system requirements?
5) What is your exact Operating System: MacOS 10.6.1, Windows 10, etc, and what version of Microsoft Office are you running?
6) What is exact version you are using/installing, such as ChemOffice 21 or ChemDraw Professional 20.1?
7) Are there error messages? Include the exact text or a screen shot.
8) Is this is a new installation? Did you delete the old version first?

See Youtube for usage tips. See the MGCF for more software.