Well, you can activate a product key with a custom license field (like "trial expires"). Then when the customer activates you know they've begun their trial.
Tracking initial product usage
Im looking for a way to be able to track if/when a person who downloads one of our 30-day trial products actually installs and start using it.
Do you have any thoughts/suggestions on how I might leverage our existing LimeLM system to accomplish this?
Thanks, Wyatt. I'm trying to get my head around how this would work. It sounds like this would be different than the normal methodology, yes? Normally with LimeLM, and how we work now, the user doesn't have to do any activation during the trial - they just start using the product and the 30-day trial countdown begins.
I think what you're suggesting is to generate a license key when the user downloads - activating with this key would initiate the 30-day trial period, and the key would need to contain a date in that custom field that is 30 days from the key creation date. Our startup code would check this date and use that check to determine whether their trial period was active or had expired.
Then if a user purchases, I guess we would generate another "permanent" license key for them, without the custom field data?
Is this what you had in mind? If I'm off base, please correct me. Thanks much!
Is this what you had in mind?
Yes, that's exactly it.
Then if a user purchases, I guess we would generate another "permanent" license key for them, without the custom field data?
You don't even have to generate another key (unless you want to). Just clear the "trial" license field.