Annual License

[FermWorks]

We sell a LV application (exe) that requires an annual license. The license is also limited to a certain number of items that we manage in our code. We wrote our own licensing scheme to handle these conditions that works fine, but we are considering a more "professional" licensing & activation method with more features, such as that offered by TPLA, Deploy, BLT, and possibly VIPM (does it do this?).

Two questions:

1. Can any of these products handle annual licensing and/or extra conditions provided by the application (such as number of items < max) ?

2. We can keep using our own licensing scheme, but we need some way to automatically capture user contact info so we can follow up after someone downloads our software demo from the NI Tools Network*. How could we do just that part?

*NI captures contact info from downloads for their own use but does not share with third-party Alliance company (us), because of privacy rules.

[mbaudot]

BLT for LabVIEW should perfectly meet your requirements.

It allows you to define all the following attributes (each one is optional)

• an absolute expiration date
• a number of valid days after the first day use
• a number of launches before making the license not valid

One license can be valid for 1, multiple or unlimited computers (you choose the value)

If you are allowing multiple computers, you can specify the number of simultaneous uses for a license, etc... There is many more attributes and settings that you can specify for a license.

When you build your exe with BLT, you specify which are your default trial license settings.

Then when your customer downloads your software on the Tools Network, he will be prompted to enter his Activation Key, or register for a Free trial license which will have the default settings you've specified during the build. During this registration process, your customer is prompted for First Name, Last Name and valid Email address (this is where he will automatically receive his unique trial Activation Key required to use your product). At the end, a new license is automatically generated into your BLT for this user.

If you have activated the "Session and Error tracking" feature for the license, you will be able to follow very accurately how your software is used, retrieve error logs, etc... and communicate with the customer on his email.

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions, and you can try BLT for 30 days now. It's tested and ready to use.

(Be also aware that a new version is coming really soon, with new design and amazing new features such as branding colors and splash screen customization)

Regards,

Matthias Baudot.

[FermWorks]

Thanks, Matthias.

Sounds interesting.  How much?  ;  )

So we could accomplish the annual licensing by setting the number of valid days after first day use = 365 (more or less)? Do you have a warning system so that they aren't taken by surprise when the time is up? Currently we start to warn users a couple of months ahead of time.

Among the "many more attributes and settings" is there the ability to add our condition (number items < max) ?

When is the license checked, at app startup, or do we use an API to check programmatically whenever we want?

[mbaudot]

Absolutely, you can specify 365 or whatever number of days after which you want to lock the product. Each time the user is launching the software, the activation popup (and soon your customized splash screen) displays the remaining number of days, or machine, or any attribute configured for the license. There is also a special shortcut that you can give to your customer to allow us to display all the details for their license, as well as your product updates change log (if you enter it in BLT).

It's not currently possible to add your own condition checking as part of the BLT activation process, but this feature is in the roadmap development for BLT and should be available by the end of september.

The license check is done at app startup. BLT generates automatically a new startup VI for your exe. This VI accomplished the license check and then, start your own VI if successful.

There is also an API (not yet documented) available to check enabled features (you can define features and disable parts of your code), track and log errors, check license details, etc...

I can definitely help you more on this if you need more information.

Please check on http://studiobods.com/en/produits.html for BLT pricing information.

It's defined based on:

1. Number of seat licenses for the License Server Management software
2. Number of deployment licenses you want to grant. One deployment license count for 1 license activated on 1 unique machine. So 1 license activated on 3 different computers will count for 3 deployment licenses

[wirebirdlabs]

MegKB wrote:

we are considering a more "professional" licensing & activation method with more features, such as that offered by TPLA, Deploy, BLT, and possibly VIPM (does it do this?).

Hi Meg, a little further disambiguation for Deploy: it does not specify/necessitate/recommend a particular licensing provider, but rather provides a formalized entry point for incorporating your licensing API of choice into the deployment process. Thanks!