 The Licensing Experience
Software licensing, like user interface design, is not an issue that can be addressed just with technology. Licensing will be part of your customer’s experience with your product. It is up to you to define that experience, and it’s the job of your licensing software to implement that experience.
The ideal licensing experience varies by type of product and type of customer. A consumer oriented game might call for a very tight activation scheme, under the theory that if the software were “cracked” it would become widely distributed. An application targeting corporations might tolerate a looser and more flexible scheme, where the purpose of the licensing is more to help customers remain honest and keep track of their licenses than to resist attacks. Industrial software might be a mix – where a high level of security is required, but direct connection to the Internet is unavailable.
And as for user-interface design, this too is a key aspect of the licensing experience.
- Do you ask for a license key on installation? When the program is run the first time? Or allow a key to be entered any time during a trial period?
- Or perhaps you don't have the user enter a license key at all - perhaps it is automatically retrieved when the user logs into your current web site or delivered and installed automatically as part of a transaction using your existing ecommerce infrastructure?
- What kinds of warnings do you want to give to users when their license is due to expire, or when a license is invalid?
- What kind of activation do you want? Explicit activation? No activation? Passive activation?
- And what questions di we fail to ask? Questions that you will be asking of your licensing system. Will it have the flexibility to adapt to your needs?
The Desaware Licensing System supports a wide variety of licensing experiences – it is designed to be adapted to suit your needs.
More important, it is designed to implement licensing scenarios that take human nature into account to offer a high degree of security while still providing a flexible and friendly user experience.
Buy the Desaware Licensing System for $1495 (includes one client and one server license) |
