Entries by Konrad Marszalek

X-Formation's team consists of 12 talented developers, sales and support people located at our head office in Arhus, Denmark and our R&D office in Krakow, Poland. The team is led by Henrik Goldman, X-Formation’s founder, who has over 10 years of in-depth experience with license management and security, and holds an M.Sc. in Information Technology.

You may be wondering, how are 12 people enough to provide high-quality services and products? Our answer is to use our valuable resources very wisely, being as effective and efficient as possible. Our team consists of only the most talented and skilled professionals. All X-Formation team members either hold master's degrees in their fields or are in the process of obtaining master’s degrees. Not only are all of X-Formation’s team members experts in their profession, they are innovative, creative, and impassioned about their role in X-Formation’s success, which translates directly to our customers’ success.

With a strong, capable development team and smooth-running automated systems, we ensure the highest level of product quality. Designing our products to be easy to use and ensuring top quality on every software production stage allows us to handle hundreds of customers without much effort from X-Formation Support. The support capacity available is more then enough to truly listen to customers and potential customers.

Being a well-organized team with a proven, agile software development methodology lets us establish close partnerships with our customers that help us to better understand and accommodate their individual needs. With our development team working in 2-week cycles to implement your feedback, we ensure that the most important issues to our user community are addressed quickly. 

Part of our support and development team.

X-Formation Office will be up and running during Christmas-New Year break except for the following individual days:
- 24th December 2009
- 25th December 2009
- 31st December 2009
- 1st January 2010

During these days we will be unavailable by email and phone. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

We wish you a bright and joyful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

For some vendors, a license model based on CPU cores can be the best method for effectively pricing your software.

Since this license model bases licensing on your customer's computing resource requirements, the more powerful machine the customer has, the higher the license price. For example, since a 4-CPU machine is double the speed of a 2-CPU machine, you can price a license for a 4-CPU machine at double the cost for licensing a 2-CPU machine.

This license model is particularly desirable for distributing high-tech computing, application virtualization, calculation, and other such software.

With LM-X v3.1, it's easy to implement such a licensing model. You just use the appropriate flags in the LM-X Checkout function to set the count to either the number of logical or physical CPUs. LM-X will then check the corresponding CPU count on the machine and checkout the suitable number of licenses if available.

LM-X users might be interested in learning the details on implementing licensing based on CPU cores by reading our How-to article, "Using CPU cores for floating licenses."

With more and more vendors using LM-X License Manager, the amount of software on the market that's protected by LM-X is rapidly increasing. Typically, LM-X is used by medium and large companies, who ship their LM-X protected software to a great number of their own software end-users.

With such extensive distribution and ever-growing presence in the marketplace, X-Formation products have now been deployed to over 10,000 users world-wide in practically every industry, as you can see on our website’s End-Users page.

In fact, we are even LM-X end-users ourselves: we use LM-X License Manager for our License Statistics product. This gives us a personal and invaluable perspective on what an end-user experiences with LM-X protected software.

The opinion of end-users contributes greatly to the improvements we make to LM-X. While we strive to provide the best in software security, we understand it’s crucial that end-users find the license manager easy to use and robust with the features they expect, such as grace and borrow licenses, automatic server discovery, and redundant server support.

We are always striving to deliver the very best quality to everyone who uses our products. By actively listening to our customers and implementing true customer-driven development through tools such as our issue tracking system, we ensure that we're in touch with all our users' needs.

Recently, we introduced a new community resource on the X-Formation website: How-to Guides. Even with complete, comprehensive technical documentation, it's helpful to have less formal, step-by-step guides for solving particular problems.

X-Formation likes to share the knowledge we've gained during years of experience in the software licensing market. The How-to Guides describe how to accomplish specific tasks, such as implementing both common and sophisticated license models with LM-X License Manager. We also introduce use cases for License Statistics and License Distribution Service.

We're sure that visitors to the X-Formation website will find these guides very useful, especially since most of the articles have been created in response to actual needs our customers have reported. There are already over 20 guides in all, and with as many additional topics in the queue and new ideas coming to us nearly every day, the number of guides will increase rapidly.

If you have an idea for a How-to Guide that you would find helpful, be sure to let us know.

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.

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.

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.