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| Software Licensing Concepts With EasyLicenser |
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EasyLicenser is designed to support the primary activity of generating, distributing and validating keys with your product, as well as activities related to managing the keys and associated information on your customers and products.
Preliminary Steps
Before you can start license protecting your products with EasyLicenser, you need to take the following preliminary steps:
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The first step is to perform a one-time download of the EasyLicenser product, which you have already done. |
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Next, you perform the development activities involved in interfacing your product to EasyLicenser’s run time library. To do this, you use the run time library API Java documentation that is included with the product. |
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Finally, your product packaging should include or embed the EasyLicenser run time library. The run time library has a footprint of about 13K bytes. |
License Key Generation And Management
In the steady state, you can either generate keys using the License Manager user interface console or (if you are licensed for the eCommerce option) with the key generation API’s. If you use the eCommerce option, you can maintain your own database of keys, customers and products. If you use the License manager console, EasyLicenser’s lightweight database manager is automatically used. In either case, you maintain a repository of all the keys that you generate. The following diagram illustrates the process of managing keys with the License Manager console: |
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When you start the License Manager graphical console, the main screen you are presented with has all the widgets that are required to generate one key or batches of multiple keys. |
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After you compose your parameters for a batch of keys, you activate key generation, and then publish the keys to a file in a format of your choice. The contents of the file may be in XML format if desired, which permits automated processing for emailing customers or embedding in product configuration files. If you are an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and you wish to license-protect your product so that it is used only in the context of your OEM reseller’s products, you may issue keys to the OEM reseller. Conversely, if you are an OEM reseller and your product includes one or more OEM products, your OEMs can use EasyLicenser to provide you with keys that you can embed into your license keys with the Professional Edition of EasyLicenser. |
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You can distribute the keys for your product in one of several ways according to your product and your preferences. For example, you can email keys to your customer, who may have downloaded your product or installed your product from a CD in trial mode. Alternatively, you can embed the key in a property file and make the combination of the property file and your product binary available for download to a paying customer. For products that are distributed on CD-ROM, your assembly line can stamp a serial number on each CD case, where the serial numbers are auto-generated from the License Manager and are used as the basis for generation of keys that are embedded into the product CD. Your product can ask the user for the serial number during installation or first-time execution. |
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You may have generated time limited evaluation keys for your customers. Periodically, you can use the License Manager to identify customers whose evaluation keys are expiring, and then contact the customers to convert them into paying customers. When you convert a customer, you generate a production license key that you can ship to your customer so that they can simply plug in the production key into their copies of your product instead of being required to install a production copy of your product. |
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When business is good, you will occasionally deplete your quota of License Units that you obtained from us. When this happens, you can visit our web site to obtain a new key for an additional quota according to your needs, and conveniently recharge your EasyLicenser license with the new key using the License Manager. You can do this in the middle of your key generation operations without disruption. |
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Occasionally, should circumstances warrant it, you may wish to conduct an audit of your customer’s keys to verify conformance to your product license terms. You can do this by obtaining your customers’ keys and analyzing their details with the License Manager. |
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Occasionally, you may wish to export your database to an external system, or import data from an export file that was previously generated, possibly from another EasyLicenser installation. You may wish to perform this operation for many reasons, including data consolidation, selective backups, for report processing in a relational database, and for interchanging data with contact managers or other database systems. You can utilize the License Manager console’s import / export facilities to perform this database maintenance operation |
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To protect your configuration and databases from media failures, you will likely perform frequent backups using the License Manager’s backup facility. In the event of media failure, the corresponding restore facility can be used to restore the state of your installation to a specified backup. |
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