Meta-licensing of applications
- by Gene
I'm currently evaluating license management solutions for our customized and project-based applications, which are supported by a single server in the intranet of the customer. The applications use common functionality provided by the server (session handling, data synchronization, management capabilities, etc) and are installed on mobile devices. We allow our customers to run the applications on X devices and want to check on the server, whether the customer sticks to this limit (based on the sessions). We don't want licensing software to be installed on the devices itself (for example providing X serials to the customer) nor do we want to host an additional server for licensing in the intranet of the customer. If a client connects, our server should load the license for the application running on the client and verify, that there are sessions left.
The licensing managers I looked at (12 products so far) focus on the application itself and don't allow me to implement such a floating behavior as described above. For example, this software could easily be used to create a "Standard Edition" or a "Professional Edition" of our server software, which is not our intention. In XHEO DeployLX there is a "Session Limit", which allows to limit the license to the currently established sessions in ASP.NET, which comes very close to my needs.
I'm currently thinking of implementing a custom solution, which allows me to load and enforce custom-defined licenses per application on the server-side and a simple editor to define such licenses (which would contain a type and the limit itself), but I would appreciate an existing, easy to integrate commercial solution. I think it could be possible to use DeployLX for this task, but I would spend a lot of money for implementing most of the solution myself (except for the editor).
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or hints.
Gene
