License Activation is a topic that many people have an aversion to, as it's typically seen as being overly complex and difficult to understand and use. Industry examples show time and again that there's a clear need for software license activation, but give no clear answers. One such example that comes to mind is Adobe's failed attempt about a year ago to enforce licensing. They had to give up these efforts, due to an unanticipated additional administrative burden on their customers.
Recently, we've deployed a license activation solution for our own customers. While we're obviously nowhere near the size of companies like Adobe, we still share many of the technical aspects and problems. For our customers, we prepared an article on how to
activate your licenses for License Statistics.
One customer was skeptical about our solution, having experienced frustrations with license activation in the past. The skepticism was reasonable, given that the history of license activation isn't full of success stories. This particular customer was pleasantly surprised that our license activation didn't complicate his situation. In fact, our deployment has been virtually hassle free, working for the majority of our users with no problems whatsoever. While there is certainly some burden attached to license activation, it's much less than typically expected. Even non-technical people can follow our activation procedures easily and successfully.
So, what makes our activation so simple? Actually, while we've made license activation easy for our customers, it isn't so simple behind the scenes. On the back-end, this small application depends on three machines to function correctly: a PHP web server, ASP.NET web server, and a database.
The ASP.NET server is the main component that runs License Distribution Service and deals with key generation and communication with the activation applications. This process depends on a database, which in our case is located on another system (although this is not normally required unless you have a large load). Our PHP web server is another front end component that connects License Distribution Service to our web-based support system and allows users to see real-time information about their license status. This is particularly convenient when we help users over the phone, because they can see immediate updates to their licensing information.
As you can see, license activation doesn't have to be complicated for your users if you take the necessary steps to make it easy and convenient. License Distribution Service, as a programmable system, gives you the ability to customize license activation more easily for your own users’ needs.
