Wednesday, July 1. 2009
As a followup to the announcement we made in a previous article, " Embedded web server coming soon," we're happy to let you know that our recent License Statistics v3.0 release includes this web server, as promised.
The benefits and new possibilities our latest release makes possible are not to be underestimated. The first immediate benefit for License Statistics is that the software is faster than ever before and is scalable to even higher usage tracking than earlier releases.
The reaction from customers thus far has been either positive comments or, for the most part, no comments at all. Since this is a more or less invisible component of our software, the fact that it's not noticeable to most users is actually a good thing. The old adage, "no news is good news" is true in this case.
Be assured that we aren't resting after accomplishing these latest advancements, but instead are hiring more engineers to let us continue the success and incorporate all the feedback that our customers give us. Thus, you can expect even more improvements in this area as we start using our new technologies in our other products.
To find out what else is new in License Statistics v3.0, see the related blog article, " License Statistics v3.0 released."
Wednesday, June 24. 2009
Our latest release of License Statistics, version 3.0, brings some exciting new features.
The main new feature of this release is an embedded web server that generates HTML pages of license usage data on the fly, giving you a true web-based experience. This new feature results in huge speed improvements in many larger environments, as it reduces statically cached pages by over 50%, compared with previous versions of the software. Also see our previous blog article on the embedded web server: " Embedded web server coming soon."
This release also makes available a new, separately purchased add-on application called License Saver. License Saver helps you actively reduce license costs by automatically releasing specified floating licenses on idle machines. Using License Saver, you can overcome those situations where licenses are unavailable because someone forgot to log off for the day or accidentally left an application open while gone for a meeting or out to lunch. You can find out more about License Saver on our website at License Statistics Add-ons.
License Statistics v3.0 also includes improvements for parsing and publishing denied checkout requests. These log files are now automatically included with other statistics information, available for viewing from the same HTML index page.
In addition, License Statistics now lets you make statistics anonymous, so user details are not shown in reports. This helps users in countries such as Germany, where laws dictate such requirements.
As always, we’re working hard to bring you improvements that help you experience even greater effectiveness and ease of use with our software. We continue to listen and act on the requests we hear from our user community to ensure our software helps you solve real business problems.
Thursday, June 18. 2009
With our user base constantly growing, it's interesting to see how users respond to new releases of our software. Now that we have several hundred users and evaluators of License Statistics, the reaction to our latest release speaks for itself.
Within the first 24 hours of releasing License Statistics v3.0, we had more than 20% of our customers start using our new release. Furthermore, one week after the new release, almost half of our user base had downloaded our software.
Naturally, we're very pleased to let everyone know that our users are active, loyal and eager to work with us. This makes us even more committed to continuing to deliver improvements that increase the value you get from License Statistics.
Tuesday, June 16. 2009
In a recent press release, we share the success story of one of our License Statistics customers, FRIMO Group, a leading developer and provider of system solutions for the manufacturing of high quality plastic components.
FRIMO anticipates immense cost savings through using License Statistics in combination with their nationwide license pooling and rates the results of using License Statistics as outstanding. Due to its open structure, they were able to implement License Statistics into their existing solutions without difficulty, and License Statistics has fully satisfied all FRIMO's expectations.
See the press release at http://www.x-formation.com/news/press_releases.html.
Tuesday, June 9. 2009
With the Windows 7 release on the horizon, we've already had several concerned customers asking us if we're ready to support the new OS. Support for Windows 7 mainly concerns LM-X users, who want to ensure that they can release applications on time when Microsoft releases Windows 7 later this year.
We have already tested the latest build of LM-X on Windows 7 RC (build 7100), and we're proud to say that LM-X required zero changes to work with the new OS.
With these results, we can confidently assure you that LM-X will allow you to ship your software on Windows 7 when it is officially released, and that X-Formation will be ready to support you.
X-Formation will be moving to a new data center, which will result in a maintenance outage beginning Friday, June 12, at 7 p.m. and ending Sunday, June 14, at 12 a.m. (all times GMT+1).
This transition will necessitate moving physical machines to the new data center; therefore, the following services will be affected during the stated maintenance outage period:
1. Email will be down, so all emails sent to x-formation.com addresses will be bounced back to the sender.
2. The X-Formation issue tracker will be down.
3. Downloads from the X-Formation Support Portal will not be available.
4. The X-Formation website will be up, but forms will not be working correctly, so evaluation requests cannot be submitted.
5. Our license distribution and order fulfillment services will be unavailable, so products like License Statistics cannot be activated.
We apologize for this inconvenience and will make every effort to restore these services as quickly as possible.
Monday, May 25. 2009
We are excited to announce that X-Formation has reached a major milestone: we now have over 200 customers!
We have been growing rapidly, especially over the past year. As we announced earlier this year, we have opened a new R&D center in Krakow with a team of several developers, and are still hiring further talent to keep up with ever-increasing demands.
What's our recipe for success? In addition to providing our customers with full-featured, reliable license management solutions at fair prices, we constantly strive to deliver quick, responsive support. In addition, we have a strong belief that our customers are our partners, and always welcome the new ideas and feedback that you offer. By truly listening to you, we can understand and give you what you really want from our products. We believe this combination of quality, value, responsiveness, and willingness to work with our customers are responsible for our continued growth.
We are confident that our business will continue to expand at an even faster rate in the coming year. And the real winner is you, our customers, who will receive even better products and services as our resources increase.
Wednesday, May 20. 2009
With the newest version of License Statistics (version 3.0) a new utility has seen its light: License Saver.
Where a screen saver's original purpose was to save legacy monitors from a static desktop image whenever the user was not around, then similarly the purpose of License Saver is to stop usage of floating license applications whenever you're not around. To give some examples of this, e.g. you're typically not using your applications whenever you leave your machine and go to a meeting. In large organizations, this number of idle hours is typically significant and thus License Saver allows you to reduce the costs.
Technically, License Saver works by detecting the idleness of a machine using a predefined timer. Then once a machine has been idle e.g. for 15 minutes, it will suspend the particular applications specified. Next time you leave your machine, these applications will be suspended without further action allowing better resource utilization.
License Saver requires minimal administration and is prepared for efficient setups in corporate networks since it can be integrated with the company logon script. E.g., you can centrally deploy License Saver on all client machines using a network drive and a logon script.
License Saver is an add-on for License Statistics allowing you to further reuse existing license purposes.
License Saver was based on customer feedback and now makes it possible to help coportations utilize their licenses more efficiently than was ever previously possible.
Thursday, April 23. 2009
For some time, we've been very busy integrating an embedded web server into our products. Not only will this make our software easier to use overall, but in the times of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), it will allow you to manipulate most properties and views using a web browser.
Our first product to implement an embedded web server will be License Statistics. With the introduction of this capability, we will greatly increase the speed of the software, as we're finally getting to the bottom of some persistent performance bottlenecks.
This improvement will have the most impact on our largest customers, who will see that the software consumes much less CPU and memory. This speed increase is due to the fact that HTML pages will no longer need to be pre-generated like they are today. As some of our customers often have more than 10,000 concurrent files being generated, the performance improvement is significant. We're at once eliminating the need for this file generation, and rather introducing a dynamic generation of pages similar to web languages such as PHP.
As always, our code is platform-independent, and thus this embedded web server will be introduced on all the platforms on which our software is supported.
Furthermore, the development is a long-term investment in delivering improved tools for managing software licenses as requested by you, our customers.
Wednesday, April 8. 2009
Just a few months into our new R&D operation here in Krakow, Poland, we've already expanded X-Formation with five new team members. Even with this significant growth, we continue to seek for more talent to join X-Formation.
With many companies around the globe being adversely affected by the economic crisis, we're naturally pleased to let you know that this is not the case for X-Formation. On the contrary, we are continuing to grow at an ever-faster pace.
The real winner is obviously you, our customers, as we're able to work harder and faster to deliver even better solutions to you.
Monday, March 30. 2009
As mentioned in a previous article, " License Activation... for real," we recently put license activation in place for our users. The focus of the previous article was to show that despite our own complicated setup that involves using several different machines for license distribution, it doesn't have to be difficult to use. Learning from industry mistakes, we've seen that hiding complexity helps to make our customers more successful and results in less hassle for everyone.
As I mentioned previously, our setup includes a PHP web server. This particular machine drives our support portal, letting users download applications, etc. (There's nothing special about this, as it's the backbone of any modern software company who needs to offer different solutions to different customers.) We've now added a new field on the main page called "Licenses." This particular field shows the order id activation numbers that our users need to be able to activate their product and get started using the application.
The above screenshot shows what a typical customer sees. As you can see, there's not much to license activation, because most details are completely hidden. This flexibility allows you to match your users requirements and needs.
On the back-end we have more details, which lets us get a quick overview of orders and related information whenever someone requests support.
This PHP support is available in the current version of License Distribution Service, and currently works with PHP 5. It has been developed as a library that lets you connect to a License Distribution Service setup and poll and post information. This makes it efficient to connect License Distribution Service to business websites and portals such as our own.
You can see an example here: License Distribution Service - Example in PHP
Tuesday, March 10. 2009
In just about any business, there are countless communications that must take place in a timely manner, and we are no exception.
In February, we implemented many new automated scripts that send emails to our customers for various administrative and support activities, such as notifications for payment received on time, late payment reminders, and sent quote messages. In addition, we automated sending notifications at 60, 30 and 7 days prior to expiration date of the customer's account in the support system.
We also automated our pricing sheet for USD, GBP and DKK currencies. The exchange rate is currently being read from European Central Bank webservice and the prices for each product are updated daily.
These are a few more ways that we are constantly upgrading our services to better support you, our customers.
Thursday, February 26. 2009
Since this is my first X-Formation blog entry, let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Pawel Roman, and I'm a senior .NET developer at the new X-Formation R&D center in Krakow.
My primary area is License Distribution Service development, and I'm excited to tell you some of the ways that the upcoming release will help make your life easier.
This release of License Distribution Service includes a significant new feature, bulk licensing. This feature will let you specify the number of licenses that can be issued for the order you're creating.
For example, say a customer orders 50 node-locked licenses of your product. Using the License Distribution Service Administrator GUI, you can create an order for the customer, define the activation timeframe, and set the license number to 50, all with just a few clicks. You can also easily define the license locking criteria (e.g., ethernet adapter ID).
The license delivery is then fully automated. When the end user requests the license (by calling the GetLicense web service method and providing a valid hostid), checks are made for conditions such as whether the correct hostid was provided, the current date is in the activation timeframe, the license for this HostID hasn't already been issued, the license limit hasn't been exceeded, and so on.
If all conditions are met, the new license file is generated and returned as a string. If the license was already created for the particular order and host ID, the text is returned without creating a new license file.
With the License Distribution Service Administrator GUI, you can view all licenses issued for a given order, generate new licenses manually, or regenerate existing licenses at any time. Of course, License Distribution Service supports managing multiple products, customers, and orders, with fully customizable license locking criteria for each order. You can also use templates to save time when creating orders.
I hope all these features will greatly improve the efficiency of the license distribution process and help save time for everyone using License Distribution Service.
Tuesday, February 3. 2009
We are happy to announce that we now have a new X-Formation R&D center in Krakow, Poland.
We have assembled a talented team in Krakow to bring you rapid software development solutions, improve the quality of X-Formation products and services, and provide even faster support. Our current team is just the beginning, and we'll be adding more top-notch people in the coming months.
Meet the Krakow team:
Pawel Roman, Senior .NET Developer. Pawel is currently doing development on License Distribution Service and our new License Service Administration, a Windows GUI that helps you create and manage data for your license distribution service.
Konrad Marszalek, QA Engineer. Konrad provides a first line of support, handling enhancement requests and reported issues, and performs testing on the X-Formation product line.
Pawel Karwowski, Webmaster and PHP developer. Pawel develops and maintains the X-formation support system and other internal systems.
Our Krakow team is already hard at work, and looks forward to bringing you even better experiences and solutions with X-Formation products in 2009.
Friday, January 23. 2009
Isn’t it nice is to use a graphical interface instead of a dusty, old command line? In the latest release of LM-X License Manager, we’ve added the LM-X License Generator GUI. Generating license files is obviously essential for software license management, so we are very pleased to announce this significant improvement to efficiency and ease of use for license generation. Now, with the LM-X License Generator GUI, creating and managing license templates, generating license files, and sending emails with license file attachments are all just a few clicks away.
We've kept all license features in this GUI, so you can continue to customize your licenses with all the flexibility you've had in the past. (These settings are accessed using the Show Extended Settings button.) This new feature was incorporated into LM-X based on your requests for a simple, everyday tool for license generation, and is well-suited to smaller businesses. For larger businesses with greater needs, License Distribution Service, included with LM-X License Manager, provides an advanced, full-featured license fulfillment and activation system.
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