The company that I work for are looking into completely overhauling our Licensing and Software protection system for all our software products. We currently have 4-5 products that are sold over the web and installed on the clients' machine and each needs to be protected.
Our current 'in-house' system ties the license to a machine profile and this makes it difficult to manage the licenses. In the future, we need our license system to be a lot more flexible allowing for; extensions on trial versions of our software, subscriptions for both our single and floating licenses and ease of license transfer.
I was given the task of investigating the various licensing system out there and come back with a recommendation. The basic brief was;
Single License:
In the end, after looking at 8-10 products, I put my money (well, my company's money) on DeployLX and Codeveil from Xheo. It seemed to offer everything that we needed and compared to a lot of companies, it was pretty well priced.
I was given the task of investigating the various licensing system out there and come back with a recommendation. The basic brief was;
Single License:
- Tied to a machine profile.
- Must be easily deactivated from one machine and transferred to another.
- A company should be able to install our software on each PC/Laptops required, without having to go through a complicated registering/activation process. The Activation of the software licences should only happen on the server which controls the licences and use of software.
- The monitoring software should ensure that it can only be installed on one server even if that server is part of a server farm.
- The software can be evaluated for a predetermined amount of time.
- An extension may be give on the trial of the software by the use of an extension code
Subscription License
- On both the Single and Floating licenses.
Even though the support from Xheo was excellent (Gary would respond to my emails in a matter of hours and this while I was still only trialling the software). I found that the level of documentation, particularly with regards to 'How-To' style documentation to be lacking.
There is little-or-no help of any kind on the web so I've decided to document, over the next few weeks, how to achieve the results that I need to achieve and hopefully they will be of help to others.
Hopefully, it will also be a way of me getting out of doing too much internal documentation as I will just be able to point future employees who have to work with DeployLX to my blog.
