How to match customer to licence key? (and other questions)

But is there a way to link the licence keys to customers in the LimeLM dashboard? Or do I need to keep a manual administration for this?

Yes, you can use emails to identify the product keys. You can also add extra information to a key by using license features.

In my situation a customer pays for a n nr of workstations. I guess this would match nicely to the activations concept, right?

Yep. You can do this several ways. You can send a company 1 keys with N activations (i.e. it can be activated on N computers) or you can send the company N keys with 1 activation each (each computer needs a separate key).

Is there a way to identify workstations/activations other then ip address? Can I f.e. add information to the key when it is used to activate the product?

You can add information to the product key using using license features. I should note we don't use IP at all internally. We track activation based on a unique hardware ID generated from all the components of a computer. The IP address you see in the screenshots is just a quick and dirty way for you to visualize which activation came from what IP address.

We don't display the unique computer hardware ID for each activation because, unless you know the algorithm that generated the ID, it's useless for our customers.

If you need to track individual computers in a customer's company, and IPs aren't specific enough (e.g. they use N computers per IP address), then you'll need to use 1 product key per computer. Can I ask when you would ever need to track individual computers in a customer's corporation?

Is there a way to allows my customers to centrally manage their activations? I mean the possibility to let them log into my website and de-activate an activation, f.e. Or does this always have to be done from the computer that activated?

Each computer needs to be deactivated on the computer. We have a quick-and-dirty method for you to manually deactivate a computer on LimeLM, but this only does half of the process. That is, it removes the activation from our servers, but the computer will remain activated until IsGenuine() is called on the computer. So, it's easier for the customer to be deactivated on the computer.

You can always provide a tool that deactivates all of your customers computers. We can help you write such a tool.

Can you provide some more details on how the activation process works? F.e. how does the communication flow between the application and the LM server look like? How is a activation tied to a computer? Etc.

TurboActivate is the client-side component. It generates a unique hardware ID based on all of the components of the hardware. Every computer will have a unique ID. When activating TurboActivate sends this unique info along with the product key to the LimeLM servers and LimeLM either responds with an error (key already used, invalid key, etc.) or with a cryptographically signed response that the client-side can validate.

Tell me if this helps.

Thanks. Yes, this helps a lot.Sam wrote:> Yes, you can use emails to identify the product keys.That's good because I collect the email during the order process anyway.

Sam wrote:> Can I ask when you would ever need to track individual computers in a customer's> corporation?I won't myself. But I was thinking of providing the customer access via my website to their account which would provide an overview of activated workstations. Then they would need a way to identify the workstations.

Sam wrote:> Each computer needs to be deactivated on the computer. We have a quick-and-dirty> method for you to manually deactivate a computer on LimeLM, but this only does half> of the process. That is, it removes the activation from our servers, but the computer> will remain activated until IsGenuine() is called on the computer. So, it's easier> for the customer to be deactivated on the computer.I was thinking what would happen if a computer crashes. You cannot deactivate from the computer anymore in that case. But I guess the solution would be that the customer contacts us and we de-activate at the server. As the computer is crashed and needs to be re-installed in that case it does not matter that the computer itself was not de-activated, right? But does it then matter which one I de-activate on the LimeLM dashboard? And if so, how do I know the correct one?

Thanks again.

Sjoerd

I was thinking what would happen if a computer crashes. You cannot deactivate from the computer anymore in that case. But I guess the solution would be that the customer contacts us and we de-activate at the server. As the computer is crashed and needs to be re-installed in that case it does not matter that the computer itself was not de-activated, right?

That's correct. If they end-up reinstalling Windows (or replacing a faulty computer component) on that same computer they just reactivate their copy of your software on that computer. They won't need to use a separate activation.

But does it then matter which one I de-activate on the LimeLM dashboard? And if so, how do I know the correct one?

Yes, it does matter which one. This is an interesting question. If the computers all use separate IP addresses then that will be the differentiating factor. Just deactivate the the entry that matches the unused IP.

If all of the computers are behind the same IP then the activation date is the only publicly visible unique identifier. The easiest thing to do in this case is to just increase the number of allowed activations for this product key. Or, if the activation date is meaningful to the user, you can use that as the differentiator. We're going to have to think about a way to improving this.

Expecting my customers to know which one to deactivate based in date will probably be troublesome. In that case it would indeed be easiest to just raise their number of activations by one. But I wouldn't want that to be the default.

I guess an alternative would be to provide the customer with multiple keys, one per user/workstation. But I would prefer to have just one key and multiple activations because I think that is easiest for the customer and less chance to loose keys.Also I don't if using multiple keys would be possible to integrate with Avangate, the fulfillment company.So a better way of identifying activations (because by no doubt there will be customers that have all users behind the same ip address) would be appreciated, if you can think of one.

Thanks,

Sjoerd

Well, this is an extremely rare case. For instance, if the user reinstalls Windows without first deactivating, they will still be able to re-activate with LimeLM and it will use the old "slot" alloted for that computer. You won't have to first deactivate them or increment the number of allowed activations. LimeLM will recognize their computer.

It's only for cases where the computer is completely obliterated (fire, explosion, misplaced glass of soda) will this problem exist. I think these cases will be rare enough that incrementing the number of allowed activations will be the easiest method.

That being said, we are thinking of other ways we could ID these users for you.