License sale and delivery server
Avoid hassle when creating licenses and delivering them to your customers
We will walk through a fictional but realistic example with screenshots. You can also try this process yourself: follow this link. Contact our staff to get the user name and password to examine the site.
License sale and delivery
Simon works at the sales department of a software company iPower. The software company uses QuidLM to sell and deliver licenses to their customers, and Simon administrates the delivery server.
He receives an order to create and deliver the license for his company's software product to a customer. He visits the Products page which lists the licenses that can be created. Simon's company is a maker of PowerReports software, which is available in two flavors - as a Software Development Kit and as a Microsoft Excel plugin. Both of these are present in the Products table, to allow Simon to create licenses for those products. Moreover, PowerReports XL, the Excel plugin flavor is present in two versions. That is because some customers of PowerReports XL are wary of numerical regressions, and refuse to upgrade to the latest version when it is time to renew their license. The older version of PowerReports XL, 1.0, still persists in the Products table for the sake of those customers.
He selects the appropriate + button in the Order column to create the license he needs.
The dialog box prompts him to enter the recipient of the license and other license parameters.
Some parameters are common to all possible products. The next section describes those.
Mandatory license parameters
- Recipient
- Each order to create a license must specify a recipient - and the Recipient input requires the email address of the customer to whom the PSN will be delivered.
- End date/Duration
- Licenses are time limited - their validity period can be specified by either the End date or the Duration - one of those inputs have to be filled during the order creation. If you would like to deliver a perpetual license, that can be approximated by creating a license that is valid for 1000 years.
- Maximum number of activations/floating users
- Licenses can be node-locked (tied to one computer) or floating (tied to a license server). If you are creating a node-locked license, specify the Maximum number of activations. If you specify a non-zero Maximum number of floating users, the license will be floating.
Optional license parameters
Licenses also allow optional parameters. Start date is one such optional parameter that every license has. The license can be delivered to the customer before the start date, but will be inactive until that date. Note that the Start date value interacts with the Duration parameter. If the start date is specified, the expiration date of the license is that date plus duration. If the start date is unspecified, the expiration date of the license is the activation date plus duration.
Other optional parameters are customizable and depend on the license. They are listed under the Options caption. The parameters can be strings, dates, numbers, or booleans. The input fields ergonomically cater to the type of expected input. For example, date parameters are represented by date selectors, and booleans are shown as toggles.
Orders
The successful submission of the above dialog produces a PSN, which can be delivered to the customer by email. The customer can redeem the PSN for a license file on her device - a computer or a license server. The orders are listed on the Orders page.
The page has a table of license creation orders. The table rows can be sorted by clicking on the column titles or filtered by selecting items from the dropdowns above the column titles. The rows can be expanded by clicking the triangle icons at the right edge - to see the literal license strings delivered to the customers' computers. If a customer loses the license file, the license string for the customer's computer can be copied from the order and manually re-delivered. Customers can also use their license activation software to get their licenses again.
Activations
The orders that have been fulfilled are listed on the Activations page. The page contains the information about the computers to which the licenses are currently tied and which PSNs were used. In addition to the usual filtering and sorting functionality, there are controls for selecting a date range to get a shorter list.
Offline activation
The server also has a page that is accessible to all customers.
The customers who have a PSN can procure licenses for their computers using the license activator application. The application uses an Internet connection to redeem the PSN for a license file on their computer. If they need a license on a computer that is not connected to the Internet, they may use the offline activation page to procure the license file. This process, called offline activation, takes three steps:
- Create the fingerprint file of the offline computer. The file has to be then copied to a computer that does have Internet, to be used on this page.
- Type your PSN in the Product Serial Number field of this page and drop the fingerprint file onto the Browse... field, then press the Submit, which will start the download of the license file.
- Copy the license file to the offline computer from step 1.