P R O D U C T
Bringing Together What Belongs Together
Organizing your products has just become even easier with CodeMeter License Central 2.20: Product bundles allow you to
structure your products even better and take the effort out of the sales process.
The Situation
Imagine a typical example: You have a set
of products not unlike the popular Microsoft
Office suite. The applications in your suite
are a word processor, spreadsheet software,
presentation software, a mail client, a
notepad, and a database frontend. Each can
be bought on its own, or as part of one of your
package bundles: Basic, Pro, or Ultra. The table
below illustrates how the bundles exist in a
product matrix.
Basic
Pro
Ultra
Word Processor
X
X
X
Spreadsheets
X
X
X
Presentations
X
X
X
Mail
X
X
Notes
X
X
Database
In this example, every license would get a
Product Code of the type 1001000, 1001100,
1001200 and so on.
The choice of Product Codes depends on
your actual needs. It can make sense to use
number sets for different product groups, as
we did with the 100xxxx for our hypothetical
office application suite. We left a number of
gaps in this list of codes to keep the option of
licensing special sub-functions available for a
later date.
The individual products can be identified by
Product Codes in this manner. Alternatively,
this can be done with individual bits in a
feature map or a specific bit mask in the
protected data. Both options are more laborintensive and limit some of the automatic
features built into CodeMeter License Central.
Using distinct Product Codes also improves
security for the protected applications: Each
Product Code has its own secret cryptographic
master key, and the most sophisticated hacker,
even with access to one key, could not extract
any other key.
X
Coordinating the Licenses
Any software consultant will know and have
come in contact with the many different
ways in which software licenses can be
implemented. The most versatile and flexible
way of coordinating the licenses for such
a product matrix is to assign a dedicated
Product Code to each licensable product.
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