FLEXnet Publisher

To maximize revenue and market penetration, software and hardware producers need to offer licensing models for their products that fit each customer’s needs. But you don’t want to have to go back to product development every time a new model is used.

FLEXnet Publisher gives you complete flexibility in deciding which licensing terms to use with your software. It gives you the power to quickly react to market changes by altering licensing on the fly without help from your development teams. 

FLEXnet Publisher makes it easy for you to introduce products with a simple licensing model, such as locked licensing, and then easily migrate to more sophisticated ones, such as floating licensing and product bundle licensing – all without any infrastructure upgrades.

You can select from over 1,000 license models for your products, including the popular floating, token, and named user models.

Other licensing options include:

• Expiration date: The license expiration date is specified in the certificate.
• Product version: The license version coincides with your product’s version.
• Date-based version: The license version is based on a date.
• Capacity: Dynamically adjust entitlement based on system performance parameters.
• Duplicate grouping (license sharing): Defines rules when duplicate requests from the same user, host, or display share one license.
• Linger: The license is held, rather than checked in, by the license server on behalf of the user after the product exits.
• Named hosts: The list of distinct host names is defined by the end-user license administrator.
• Network segments: Limits usage to hosts on a specific subnet.
• Overdraft: Specifies a number of additional licenses which your end user will be allowed to use, in addition to the licenses they have purchased.
• Package: Defines a set of products or features to be licensed as a single package.
• Package suite: Provides a way for users to share floating licenses among components of a package.
• Platforms: Allows you to restrict usage to particular hardware platforms.
• Start date: By default, a license is valid as soon as it is signed. However, if a start date is specified, the license is invalid until the start date.
• Supersede: Replaces previously issued license rights.
• Terminal server support: Allows users to run on Terminal Server Client machines or over Remote Desktop.
• Timeout: Causes the license to be returned to the general pool of available licenses if the product is not active for a specified number of seconds.
• Vendor defined: Used for vendor-defined entitlement, such as token-based.
• License sharing: License requests can be grouped so that multiple requests from the same entity share only one license.
• License pooling: The license is fulfilled from a prepaid number of license days for the usage period.
• Borrowing: Enables a user to temporarily obtain a license for a limited period of time while the user is disconnected from the local network.

Offering customers the use of product trails or evaluations is a good way to shorten sales cycles and generate interest in your software. However, ensuring the trial or evaluation process is done in a way that is transparent to the customer while making certain a tight control is kept by the producer can be a major challenge.

FLEXnet Publisher makes it easy to license products as trials or evaluations in a controlled manner. It allows you (the publisher) to ship rights with your hardware or software, so evaluations can happen without the customer calling back to your support organization or connecting to your license management system.

You can enable a user to temporarily obtain a license for a limited period of time while they are disconnected from the local network. This way, even though they are detached, you still control how long they are able to access your software.

Most unauthorized software use occurs after products have been decrypted by paying customers, including the copying of licenses to unauthorized computers.

FLEXnet Publisher helps prevent this revenue loss by reigning in unauthorized use without negatively impacting your customers’ user experience. It has sophisticated machine binding that ties a license to a specific user or machine, preventing unauthorized usage or copying. It helps ensure that only licensed users can access your products according to your contract terms.

FLEXnet Publisher helps you maximize revenue by making it easy to deliver multiple product versions (such as lite, standard, or premium) from a single set of binaries through new licensing files.

With FLEXnet Publisher, you can quickly create product versions that target different customers or markets by using electronic licenses to turn features on and off. It’s an easy way to sell products to customers the way they want to buy – and you can do it without waiting for help from your development staff.

Mergers and acquisition are becoming more and more common in the software and hardware industries. But packaging newly acquired products with your software can be time-consuming and difficult.

FLEXnet Publisher makes it easy to integrate your products together, including those from mergers and acquisitions. You can cross-sell and up-sell products licensed together as packages and suites, and make changes on the fly without waiting for help from your development staff.

Most unauthorized software use occurs after products have been decrypted by paying customers, often times unknowingly.

FLEXnet Publisher has patented Trusted Storage technology that delivers your usage rules in the form of license certificates to specially dedicated and protected locations on each customer’s computer. It not only enforces your rules, but notifies you of any license changes, so you can control usage without impacting usability.

• Store licensing rules on computers and protect them from malicious attacks or unintended changes
• Enable customers to manage licenses as needed without violating compliance
• Turn off licenses to prevent abuse during deactivation, transfers, or upgrades

FLEXnet Publisher now enables you to provide your customers with an easy way to manage their usage of your applications.

It includes the new LMAdmin tool, which gives your customers the power to manage FLEXnet Publisher license servers with a few simple mouse clicks and keyboard entries. LMAdmin has a rich graphical user interface that saves them time by making it easy to perform license management tasks, such as configuring the vendor daemon and license manager, stopping servers, and rereading license files.

The LMAdmin graphical dashboard presents your customers with a clear picture of license rights status (both concurrent licenses and activatable licenses are displayed). Plus LMAdmin enables your customers to set up alerts to automatically notify them whenever licenses are running low or unavailable, vendor daemons are down, and much more – so they can better avoid issues.

And since the administration of FLEXnet Publisher servers is performed through a Web-based experience, LMAdmin simplifies the deployment of FLEXnet Publisher servers for your customers while tightening security.

Please note: The LMAdmin tool provides a number of server administration improvements around usability and efficiency not found in lmgrd, FLEXnet Publisher’s command line interface tool. However, if some of your customers prefer to manage licenses using lmgrd, it is still available with FLEXnet Publisher.