Software License Management – X-Formation

Since this month we’re celebrating our one year anniversary in our new office, we thought it’d be nice to share a few pictures and some news. Exactly 1 year ago we made the move to a new office. The move was necessary as we were growing very quickly in terms of employees (and still are, actually) and were beginning to feel a little cramped in the space we were occupying.

The change was certainly a significant one; our current office is much larger with 4 times the space and consists of 2 floors. The 1st floor is completely open space with 1 meeting room. The open space is great because it allows teams to collaborate more freely and effectively. The 2nd floor is the same exact space broken up into 6 rooms; 1 room for the LM-X team, 2 rooms for the sales and support team, a meeting room, the server room, and a game room that holds our foosball and ping-pong tables. All in all we’ve got lots of space with lounge chairs and sofas, meeting tables, and plenty of rooms where employees can take their laptops with them to work any way they’re comfortable or need privacy. Check out some of our pictures below.

Before and after picture of the 1st floor.

 Where the magic happens…

Part of the XF team.

Let the games begin!

Meet Giraffe. He’s always got the most to say at our daily scrum meetings.

Our new office has come together very nicely and has also been an important factor in delivering better service to our customers. It’s been an exciting year for X-Formation, and the new location has certainly been the start of another chapter in our history.

Are we still hiring?
We definitely are! We’re looking for C++ and PHP developers, as well as sales and support engineers. For a complete list of available positions, see our jobs page or simply stop by our office to talk more…

ul. Ostatnia 1c
31-444 Krakow
Poland

As you can see on the map, we’re easy to find and close to the city center.

We’ll welcome you with open arms!

We’re happy to announce the release of License Statistics v4.1, which makes available the following new features:

Improved LDAP user group importing. You can now import entire sub-trees, instead of only single nodes as in previous releases. This makes LDAP support more flexible for larger organizations with multiple domains.

Ability to see LDAP user information. We’ve added tooltips that show LDAP user information in grids that contain usernames. With this enhancement, you can see all LDAP user details such as full name, department and phone number.

Persistent UI. As you move from tab to tab, you will see that the settings you make, such as expanding/collapsing panels, are remembered. This is a time-saving benefit that lets you make your preferred settings once instead of setting them per page.

In addition to introducing these new features, we’ve made many smaller improvements, including adding support for a newer Dassault license server version, better logging, support for larger license counts in log files, and improvements to the Apache configuration to support more Linux distributions, such as RHEL, out of the box.

You can see the full release notes for License Statistics v4.1 in our Knowledgebase, at http://kb.x-formation.com/questions/314/License+Statistics+v4.1+Release+Notes.

Every release is influenced by our customers and this one is no exception. Help us make License Statistics better for you by sharing your feedback with us. We look forward to hearing from you at +1 406 322 2614  or support@X-Formation.com.

Thanks to our customer feedback, the driving force behind our development, we’ve been hard at work to introduce some great new features in License Activation Center that provide ease of use and convenience for users as well as improved functionality.

New “Expired Licenses” Table
One of the first things vendors will notice upon logging into LAC is a new “Expired Licenses” table on the dashboard. As the name states, this table provides detailed information about the licenses that can no longer be used by the vendor’s customers. The table includes information about the customer, the product he had previously activated, the time and date it was activated, and when the license expired. Now, with this information at the vendor’s finger tips, it’s much easier to go after customers that haven’t renewed their purchases!

Minimum HostIDs
The Min HostIDs field lets vendors specify the total number of HostIDs required to activate a license. As an example, vendors can specify that the user must enter a total of 3 out of the possible 5 HostIDs upon activation.

License Manager Type
When creating new products, vendors will now choose a license manager from a drop-down menu in the general tab. Choosing a particular license manager will influence various settings made available in the License Generator tab. And for those who don’t already know, License Activation Center supports:

• LM-X License Manager
• FlexNet Manager
• Reprise License Manager (RLM)

“Creator” Column
The License Orders table includes a “Creator” column which shows information about the user who created a particular license order. Additional information in the table includes creation date, template name, expiration date, and so forth.

Login Page Improvements
Vendors can create new accounts as well as reset their passwords from the login page. So, anyone that would like to give LAC a try can do so without any hassle. No need to fill out boring registration forms or wait to hear back on your evaluation request; simply sign up and test run LAC with 25 free activations per month.

“Save and Close” Button
The “Save and Close” button is available in the Customer, Contact, License Order, Product Template, Feature, and Product windows, allowing users to save their settings and immediately close the window with just one click. More action, less clicking; that’s how we like it!

Email Notifications
For vendors that like to stay on top of things, we’ve implemented email notifications to let them know that they are slowing running out of available license activations. The email is sent out when there are fewer than 10 activations available. But don’t worry; LAC users get their 25 free license activations every month!

New SOAP Functions
We’ve also made improvements to the Vendor API by adding a number of new SOAP Functions that will facilitate even better interaction between LAC and licensed software:

GetCustomerById -  used to to get an existing customer using the customer ID.

GetProductTemplateById - used to get an existing product template using the product template ID.

GetLicenseOrderList - used to get a license order list. The license order contains all information about HostIDs and Features configured for the product.

FindCustomerByName - used to to find one or more existing customers using the customer name.

FindProductByName - used to to find one or more products by product name.

FindLicenseOrderByActivationKey - used to to find one or more license orders by activation key.

Like what you see? Sign up and start using License Activation Center (LAC) in 5 minutes!

Need more features? Get in touch with our team!

About Schindler GmbH

Schindler GmbH is a software vendor based out of Germany responsible for a highly regarded software platform known as S-Anywhere. S-Anywhere contains modules for maintenance and inventory management, along with tool management and an inspection chart. Schindler GmbH also offers RFID hardware and consulting services.

The Business Challenge

Schindler needed to tackle a fairly common licensing problem; finding a solution that was not only flexible, but that also fit the specific needs they were looking for. The support that was required needed to be for many different licensing models, mainly network and node-locked licensing.

The LM-X Solution

After testing and using HASP HL dongles from Aladdin, Schindler GmbH decided to investigate a new possible direction. The issue was that some customers were having problems with the hardware dongles, as servers were often outsourced or virtual servers were sometimes used. Markus Schindler, IT Engineer, explained, “IT guidelines of our customers often prohibit the use of hardware dongles. So, we searched for an alternative, and X-Formation’s LM-X License Manager offered the flexibility we were looking for. Schindler continued, ”Documentation and support was very good and X-Formation pays attention to customer’s needs.”

Summary

LM-X License Manager is a licensing solution that makes software license management easy with great features and fast support. It helped achieve the desired results in a solution with many bundled features. X-Formation is happy to be able to help Schindler GmbH with these needs and more, constantly innovating and improving the software and its features in every progressive version.

Schindler concluded, “LM-X is flexible and offers all the license types we need. Furthermore, if we have any questions, the X-Formation support team helps quickly.”

Next Step

Interested in taking LM-X License Manager for a test-drive? Download a free, 30-day evaluation or contact us for more information.

In this article, I’d like to discuss the topic of network licensing as an alternative to bulk licensing. Let’s picture a scenario where a vendor has a customer who wants to activate 100 node-locked (standalone) licenses. The most common way of going about this is through bulk licensing. However, the question to be asked is whether there’s a more efficient route to be taken. I’d like to argue that with LM-X License Manager, there is.

With bulk licensing, the customer needs to activate the same license key 100 times. This process is time-consuming, sometimes problematic, and requires a lot of effort and administrative work on the customer as well as the vendor side. Moreover, any further license changes enforce additional activations, which, on the other hand, incur additional costs. Unfortunately, this process is very often repeated by our customers and for this reason we’ve decided to offer an easier, cheaper, and simply more efficient solution for both sides.

The solution is network licensing with LM-X License Manager. Now, picture the vendor delivering his software to the customer together with the LM-X license server. As soon as the customer installs the license server, he accesses the License Management tab from license server GUI and pastes 1 activation key (not 100 keys) delivered earlier by his vendor. The customer then clicks the Activate button and waits while LM-X downloads the appropriate license from License Activation Center (LAC) and delivers it to the customer. That’s all there is to it!

The purchased software will now be able to run on as many machines as specified in the license file, and more importantly, the vendor will pay for only 1 activation instead of 100. Another advantage is that the vendor will not need to get involved every time his customer wants to rehost his license; with the LM-X license server, customers can rehost licenses themselves without comprising the vendors implemented licensing policies.

If you are an ISV struggling with such or similar issues, get in touch at +1 406 322 2614  or support@X-Formation.com, and let us find the right solution for your needs.

We’re happy to announce the release of License Statistics v4.0!

This major release implements a number of new features that make the software more scalable and enterprise-ready:

1. 64-bit MySQL server (for 64-bit Windows or Linux versions only). We’ve embedded a 64-bit MySQL server with License Statistics, which improves speed for larger environments. This can consume up to 12GB of memory, but allows for faster queries that speed up the entire web-based UI. Furthermore, we’ve updated the embedded MySQL database from 5.1 to 5.5, which is up to 300% faster in some cases (according to MySQL documentation and our own testing).
2. Added HTTPS support. We now support HTTP over SSL using Apache.
3. Added support for Felics license manager (import only).
4. Dropped all support for SQLite and the related command-line tools, xfeditdb and xfcustomreport.
5. Introduced a new command-line report tool, licstatreport, which lets you download existing reports from a command line. Using this tool, System Administrators can automate downloads of existing data from the database and schedule reporting on demand.

In addition to these new features, we’ve made many smaller parser changes to improve error message consistency and clarity.

Furthermore, this release completely removes the concurrent user licensing that has been used for all prior versions of License Statistics. Customers with older licenses won’t be able to use this new version until you update your license, as explained in the notification we sent to our affected customers in December.

For complete release notes for License Statistics v4.0, please see:
http://kb.x-formation.com/questions/310/License+Statistics+v4.0+Release+Notes

As always, the improvements we’ve made in this release were done in response to customer input. What can we do better for you? Please be sure to contribute your thoughts and suggestions to help us continue improving License Statistics in ways that make a difference for you. We are always eager to get your feedback, so get in touch at +1 406 322 2614  or support@X-Formation.com.

Due to an electrical maintenance in our office building that will be conducted over the weekend, many of our services such as online documentation or support portal will not be available. The services will be down as of Friday (January 20) approx. 7:00 pm GMT+1 until Monday (January 23) morning, approx. 9:00 am GMT+1. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Should you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at +1 406 322 2614  or support@X-Formation.com. Thank you.