alexqwHow would recommend handling site licensing with LimeLM/TurboActivate?
I have a license type whereby all the staff and students of a University or School are licensed to use my app.
Previously I've issued a license file which is distributed internally at the institution.
There are lots of ways to handle this. One way is to sell a normal product key with an estimate of how many activations the institution will need. For instance, you could sell the product key with 50 allowed activations (that is, they'll be allowed to use your software on 50 computers). Let's say they use those up, you can just edit the same product key and increase the number of activations.
Does that make sense?
alexqwThat sounds good - would I get information on the IP addresses / domains / geographic locations that the activations were coming from so I'd be able to determine if the key had become widely distributed?
Yes, every activation on the key also lists the IP address the activation came from. We don't use the IP address internally (because IP addresses are close to useless for our needs), but we do expose them to our customers so they can use it for whatever tracking they need.
alexqwThere are lots of ways to handle this.
Hmm, just noticing this might eat up a lot of activation slots. Could you outline some of the other ways?
Well, the most profitable alternative is to not offer site licenses. That is, make your customers pay for every copy they use. (If they're a big enough organization to consider buying organization-wide, then they're also big enough to afford paying for each license).
That option requires you to change the way you do business with large companies.
The other option (the one where you don't have to change the way you do business) is to use our floating license server, TurboFloat. It's not yet out -- it's coming soon. But a floating license server is basically a "mini activation server" that runs on the company's intra-net. You assign so many allowed activations for the TurboFloat Server for that company, and your software in that company requests a temporary "software lease" while an instance of your software is running.
So if you assign 20 activations to the TurboFloat server then that company will be able to run 20 instances of your software at any one time. They can install it on all the computers in the company, but they'll only be able to start 20 instances at a time.
As I said, TurboFloat is coming soon. We're pushing hard to get it out before October.
alexqwHmmm, I'd rather not have to ask my customers to install a server - but maybe a floating license would be a good way to handle it . . . i guess that would require an activate/deactive call each time the app was used. It would be nice if there was a feature that a new activation on a license automatically deactivated the least-recently used activation on the same license.
It would be nice if there was a feature that a new activation on a license automatically deactivated the least-recently used activation on the same license.
That sort of defeats the purpose of activation.
i guess that would require an activate/deactive call each time the app was used.
Not quite -- we're going to make it as simple as possible.
Very soon. The private beta wrapped up successfully. Were fixing the remaining bugs, writing the documentation, and packaging everything up. We hope to have it released in 1 and a half or 2 weeks.
filippobottegaHello!
I'm deploying a protected application with TurboActivate to a Citrix environment of a customer but he has a lot of troubles because when he publish the hard drive image to the servers, my product is deactivated. I think is due to the fact that "publishing" the hard drive is changing the hardware fingerprint.
I think I need TurboFloat. Is it possible to test a beta version to understand if I able to solve this issue?
Thanks in advance, Filippo Bottega
I think is due to the fact that "publishing" the hard drive is changing the hardware fingerprint.
Yes, that's exactly it. Or rather the hardware fingerprint of the original machine doesn't match the server machine. He can solve this be activating on the server after he publishes the image.
I think I need TurboFloat. Is it possible to test a beta version to understand if I able to solve this issue?
This is coming soon. We're wrapping up development on it now. This is an alternative to the solution above.
