Infralution Support

[ancientOne]

I am considering revising my software product definition as follows:

A "base product" which would provide basic software functionality at a relatively low cost;

Base product "feature add-ons" to enable up to a 1/2 dozen "add-on" features to the base product, each feature priced incrementally;

An "enterprise product" which would have all of the "feature add-ons" enabled.

Licensing for the base and enterprise products is straightforward, separate licenses for the two different products. The problem I am having is provisioning a manageable licensing system for all possible combinations of feature add-ons to the base license.

For example, if I offer 6 different add-on options, there are 2^6=64 possible feature combinations which I need to accommodate in the product info property of the ILS licensing system if a single product license is issued. Alternatively, I suppose I could create separate product licenses for each add-on feature and check the presence of each when the base product license is validated. I also considered bit-decoding 2 bytes of the product info string as a 2-digit integer, but this would still require 64 different ILS product variants to be created.

What is a good way to approach this within the structural framework of the ILS licensing system?

[Infralution]

There are two basic approaches to licensing features/plugins, both have advantages and drawbacks:

1. Encode the features that are licensed in the ProductInfo. For instance assign a letter to each feature and then include the letters of the licensed features in the ProductInfo. "ACD" would mean that features A, C and D are licensed. You can write a custom generator for License Tracker that allows you to display a form to select the features to include and then generates the required product info automatically.

2. License each feature/plugin independently as a separate product. So the user gets a new license key to enable each feature.

Option 1 is simple for the customer - however it does not let you easily add features to an existing license. If a customer wishes to add features later you will have to issue them a new license key (and deactivate the old key by setting the MaxAuthentication Limit to zero).

Option 2 is more difficult for your customer to manage and you would need to write some form of license manager to allow them to see which features are currently licensed.

You could also use a hybrid approach in which the features are encoded as per option 1 - but you allow the user to install multiple keys so that they can add in features later.

Personally I think that it is generally better to keep licensing options simpler and bundle your options into different packages eg Basic, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. This can be managed by just creating Product variants with different ProductInfo for each license type. Not only is this simpler to manage for both you and the customer it also upsells the customer. There is a good reason why cable TV companies sell their product like this.
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