Using different turboActivate versionsSolved

Hello,

Thanks again for your license system that in general works very well for us. 😀

We have however a problem using the new TurboActivate version 4.0.3 with an old one (3.4.6). Our customers often want to be able to use both old and new versions of our software. Below I will try to explain the problem. Assume we have the following scenario of a software product with two different versions:

- v1 uses v3.4.6 of Turboactivate.exe and Turboactivate.dll- v2 uses v4.0.3 of Turboactivate.exe and Turboactivate.dll

1. v1 has earlier been installed and activated.

2. Installing and running v2 works fine (v2 does not have to be activated because the new TA version seems to see this).

3. If v1 now is started, TA (old version) asks for activation. An activation at this point leads to a new activation, and two activations are now shown in the LimeLM dashboard.

4. Start v2, it runs well.

5. After that, start v1 again, and it will ask for activation. A third activation is now shown in the dashboard after activation.

So, starting v2 and then v1 will always lead to that an activation is "eaten". When max number of activations is reached, the user cannot activate even though it is on the same PC.

If we deactivate v1 now, only the first activation will be cleared in the dashboard. Also, v2 will not run (it will ask for activation). So, it is not(!) possible to remove the other activations shown in the dashboard. This means that we need to deactivate it manually in the dashboard for all customers that have two (or even more versions of our product), which is a lot of work due to many customers.

Solutions: (?)

1. Tell the user to uninstall (deactivate) all earlier versions when installing a new one. (Not so good since they might need the old version due to corporate rules etc).

2. Overwrite the old Turboactivate.exe and Turboactivate.dll and replace them with new ones. Not possible since the dll:s are compiled for v1 using an older version of Delphi (and we linked in "GracePeriodDaysRemaining()" which is not available in v4.0.3 and it gives an error if we try to start v1 using the new TA).

3. Use another "product" in LimeLM (i.e. a new "TurboActivate.dat") for v2. Not good since I will use many products in that case (and double the number of activations for both old and new product on a same PC).

Any ideas how we can solve this?

Thanks,Thomas

Hey Thomas,

The solution is to create a new version in LimeLM -- you can create it under the same product. Just click the "add another version to [Your app name]" link.

A brief explanation about what is happening:

TurboActivate is always backwards compatible, but is rarely forwards compatible. In fact, just assume it's not forwards compatible -- although in practice it's generally forwards within a major version.

What this means is that you can always upgrade your TurboActivate version, but you should never downgrade it (at least not without things like this happening).

So, if you want to use the same Product version of your app (same LimeLM version) using 2 different versions of TurboActivate, you'll get strange behavior.

But, the solution is to just create a separate version in LimeLM, and now the 2 versions of TurboActivate can coexist nicely.

Thanks Wyatt,

But this means that we need to distribute new product keys to all customers. The example above was from v1 to v2 but in real case this is just a minor update (e.g. from v3.21 to v3.22 of our software) that fixes the problem with network adapters. I.e. we want to use the new TA (v4.0.3) for v3.22. The current version v3.21 has TA v3.4.6.

Thanks,Thomas

In that case the best solution is to just prevent multiple minor versions of your app from running on the same machine. This will prevent customers from running multiple conflicting versions of TurboActivate for the same product version (LimeLM product version, that is).

Yes, that would probably be the best solution. Thanks.

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