Infralution Support

[Guest]

Hi!

I've downloaded your lincense system, and it looks very promising, and I like the simplicity of the interface and licensing code. I'd like, however, try to explain some of our needs, as I would like to hear your comments on how to address them:

Our products are fairly expensive and targets large enterprises and are not massive Internet sale. The price for one of products is calculated on the amount of unique users on the system. To keep costs low, the customer might start out with buying only 1.000 unique users. Later on, the customer might add another 9.000 users (or any other arbitrary amount), totalling 10.000. This value, of course, we want to read runtime. In your license system, we would have to create single, unique license, that carry a data payload of the amout of users allowed in the ProductInfo textbox, and then create a sale to that customer. Later on, we would create a new sale, and before that a new license with new payload data (correct me, if I've missed a feature that addresses this). Actually, it might be more interesting to be able to embed such data in the sales moment, if possible...

Furthermore, some enterprise applications have even more complicated licensing schemes, where there are several values to test upon. In your current solution, it's only possible to add this data by writing something like "value1,value2,value3" in the ProductInfo textbox (correct?). This could cause a lot of typos. For this, you might want to consider making it possible to create a key/value schema for a product by declaring them in an xml configuration file. It could be very nice if it was possible define several displayname/systemname/valuetype[string/int] for an application, such as users (int) and amount of processors (int) etc., and have your application enforce that these are filled during license/sale creation. Different schemas for each application type, of course...

In code, it could be fetched via some property, looking like:
int users = (int)EncryptedLicense.Payload["Users"];

I'm aware that this could increase the length of the resulting key dramatically, but in our situation we're willing to accept the badwill of the users copy/paste

Also, it would be nice, if you create import/export of customers and sales, and include a costumer ID field.

However, I'm just thinking lound and try to fit our needs into your application. Maybe you're not even considering to target demands like ours, and that is, of course, quite ok! I'd rather have you saying that, instead of starting out, and then find that we cannot use our licensing software to, for example, support our partners.

I look forward to your comments.

Christer

[Infralution]

There are a couple of different options that may satisfy your requirements using our current release.

1. Your could write your own key generator. The License Key Generator is a very simple application - it basically just calls methods from the Licensing DLL. You could use the Infralution.Licensing DLL to implement something similar that would take your particular parameters in separate text boxes and stuff them into the ProductInfo (to avoid typos). With this solution if you wanted to use the License Tracker you would then have to import the generated keys into it. Currently you would have to import the License Keys and then separately import the sales data - but we will be changing this in the next release to give you the option of importing keys as you import sales data - to facilitate customers who want to use their own key generation.

2. If you would like the process more tightly integrated into the License Tracker then you can purchase the source code for LicenseTracker (this also requires purchasing a license for our VirtualTree and VirtualData products which it uses). You could then make the mods you wanted directly to License Tracker.

We are already looking at mechanisms that would allow generalised formatted input of the Product Info and your XML suggestion is not bad. You will find some other threads in our forums discussing this. We will implement something along these lines in the next major release (probably a couple of months away).
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Infralution Support

[Infralution]

Version 2.1.0 of the Licensing System has now been released. It incorporates a mechanism that allows you to customize the generation of keys by License Tracker. You can now create a Custom Generator plugin for License Tracker which can generate the ProductInfo based on customer, sale or other information by the user. Check it out - it should give you all the flexibility and power you require. See the online documentation under "Customizing License Tracker" for more info.
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Infralution Support