Developer Center Resources
What to consider
- Does your product have a trial or evaluation?
- When the trial or evaluation period expires, does your product prompt the user?
- Does your product have a documented or intuitive activation process?
- Is the add-on utilizing the NI licensing/activation API?
It is important to provide instructions for users who are unfamiliar with your particular licensing solution -- and there are many different licensing solutions used in products, so it is quite common for customers to be confused. Any additional actions outside of using an activation dialog need to be documented in your product manual.
When possible, avoid requiring the user to do anything with a license file aside from pointing your licensing utility to it's location; the licensing utility should manage copying the license file to the correct location on disk for the user. When a license file must be present on a Real-Time system, consider adding a deployment utility or VI to the LabVIEW Tools menu to handle deploying the license file and any other dependencies to the target. Please refer to the following example:
Your licensing solution can and should notify users when your product is not activated or in an unlicensed state. For product trials, it is okay to remind the user they are operating in a trial period, but you should also offer as non-intrusive of a reminder as possible -- an example of a good implementation is with LabVIEW, the activation window will default to reminding users of the trial period on every launch and provide an option to ignore or disable this pop-up for future launches.
The new Third-Party Licensing and Activation Toolkit from NI provides a similar licensing dialog upon launching LabVIEW for partner products. For products not using this licensing solution, consider implementing some form of error reporting to report the license status in an error dialog, or use a pop-up dialog window to instruct users their license is no longer valid. When reporting the licensing state be sure to also point the user to either your product manual, website, or technical support for assistance in purchasing a license.
