Category: Business

Discussion of the business of license management, ranging from whether to buy or build a license manager to various pricing models.

RLM Teams – Licensing Unleashed

Announcing a new Reprise Software product, RLM Teams.

Over the past year or two, we have talked with many software vendors who are interested in a lightweight licensing solution based on user identity, not based on locking to machines, doing away with traditional licenses and activation keys. Some of the same companies have asked for a more collaborative approach to licensing that would give more power to users to allocate licenses to their team members. So, we have developed a new product in response to these trends called RLM Teams.

RLM Teams is a easy-to-use user-based licensing portal for individuals and groups working together. Built on industry standards, RLM Teams complements the flagship Reprise License Manager product by providing you with an account-based entitlement fulfillment portal in the Cloud, giving your customers secure access 24x7x365, without requiring you to deliver licenses or activation keys.

Here’s how it works:

With RLM Teams, you provision a number of product entitlements to each customer who can then either fulfill them on their own computers, or transfer them to colleagues. When a user wants to fulfill a license, he logs into RLM Teams. Then, when he runs your application for the first time, a license is “soft-locked” (cached) to his computer for as long as you want. The license can be easily moved by the user later.

RLM Teams accounts are either “admin” users or “regular” users. Regular users can fulfill licenses for themselves, or transfer their license entitlements to someone else on the system. After transferring, they can later “reclaim” the entitlements for themselves. “Admin” users have the additional privilege of managing user accounts.

RLM Teams Features:
– Cloud-based 24×7 access
– Identity-based licensing, no permanent hardware locking
– Disconnected operation for increased speed and mobility
– No license keys or activation codes to deliver and manage
– No extra licensing components to install (just install your software)

RLM Teams Benefits:
– Always-on
– Simple “follow-the-user” soft-lock licensing
– Enable collaboration – users allocate licenses for group projects, including to outside contractors
– Once licensed, users may operate disconnected for as long as you want
– Works with standard RLM kit (14.2 or later) – once integrated, you can use RLM Teams, RLMCloud, on-premises license servers, or local node-locked licenses – without changing your code

How is RLM Teams different from Activation Pro?

With Activation Pro, you create activation keys which are later redeemed for a license. The license gets tied to the user’s physical machine and is stored there. The license is tied to the machine until it is revoked or expires. Your application must be programmed to allow the license to be revoked then reactivated elsewhere.

With RLM Teams, users have accounts on the RLM Teams portal. They log in to fulfill their licenses. As the vendor, you get to decide how long the resulting license can be used before it must be refreshed. If a user wants to move his license to a different machine, he logs into RLM Teams from the new machine, deletes the prior fulfillment, and fulfills it again.

Please contact Reprise Software for more information.

evil hacker in a hoodie in front of computer code

Telemarketers, Spammers, and Out-of-Control bots

What do all these have in common?

  • They are all annoying,
  • everyone hates them (with the possible exception of their spouses and mothers),
  • all are (to some extent) illegal, and
  • for them to be successful, they must be bad for (your) business.

What does this have to do with license management?   Nothing at all.  But this kind of behavior is an annoyance for everyone.  This week we spent an unreasonable amount of time identifying and stopping a bad bot that was generating roughly 50% of our website traffic.

When we finally found them they told us “you can block our traffic in your robots.txt file”.  Really?  (We had already blocked them).  Should the onus be on us to find them then block them, when we never asked to have them come and abuse our site?  And because their software developers don’t test their code before they unleash it on the internet at large?

They are in business to make your business worse.

When we found them, they told us this:  “(product name) is a digital marketing software that allows its users to view various information about their competitors from an SEO and SEM standpoint.”   Well, that makes me feel so much better about their bad software flooding my server with bogus requests.

In our case, their bad requests each generated a 404-not found error, which they repeated minute after minute, day after day.  And there is 0 advantage to us, in fact, their business allows our competitors to take advantage of us. Their business makes our business worse.  And they will do the same to you.  Also, their business slows down our website. And in our case, it was about to force us to upgrade our web hosting plan.  I would call that, at a minimum, unethical.  We won’t mention the company name, but they are a well-known company in the SEM business and given the state of their software, they are in a hurry to release new versions.

So their business is, at some level, putting a burden on each and every website owner (unknown to them) so that they can generate a profit. They should be compensating every website they invade, or at a minimum, requesting permission before they perform this kind of attack on a site.

Leave us a comment, and we will be happy to show you how to block them.  They have no business messing with your site.  It’s time to stop this kind of abuse.