Recent reviews?

[josborne]

Hi.  I am looking for a licensing solution for my software and BLT has come to my attention.  Looking for some independent reviews of the product.  Most recent post on this group is from 3 years ago so I am wondering if anyone has recently been using the software?  How's it working for you?

[Ozfarmboy]

We use it for one customer.

Our customer creates special laboratory instruments that get sent around the globe.

My company writes the software for them.

We use BLT so that our customer can easily update/distribute software updates to all clients, and also make available certain features to customers who have paid more.

It works generally pretty well.  There are a few quirks to get your head around, but once you've got it worked out, it's a handy tool, and reasonably priced.

Studiobods are typically very responsive and supportive, which is very important for us. They spent the time helping us getting set up for success.

The biggest challenge for us is that many instruments get installed in labs where there tends to be tight IT restrictions, which has made it hard to get BLT working in this environment.  My customer has to request the IT departments to ensure the BLT ports are enabled, and some just simply don't allow this. That said, this is nothing to do with BLT - simply an IT issue. In some cases, BLT is not usable, and they must update their applications the old fashioned way.

Also, we are based in Australia, and given BLT's server is in North America it can be a little bit slow at times. 

But functionally it serves a purpose for us very well and overall it is an affordable and easy way to help us manage our deployments, and StudioBods are quick to help out when we occasionally have issues.

[fergusson]

Hi,

We use the BLT tool for an application that one of our customers intends to sell as a product that leverages their hardware platform.

Development

As the developers of the software product our requirements meant we needed, and felt BLT covered well:

• Well documented API for various license features
• Flexible license creation with the ability to have License Editions for various feature sets
• Intuitive interface with documentation that made upskilling with the tool painless

Deployment

This was a slight nuance (but supported feature!) of our use case that meant, although we would providing the development. As the customer would be selling the product, they would need control of the licensing and therefore require their own installation of the BLT tool without the local source code.

The transition between us and the customer was seamless.

Support

During the evaluation process it was clear that with BLT there came a valuable support package:

• Inclusion of consultancy time/training as part of the purchase
• Timely response to questions
• Occasional addition of well defined features upon request, although this was never an expectation!
• Published supporting Knowledge base articles 

Would highly recommend the tool, hopefully this helps!

Thanks Matt

CLA, CLED

[jrmlgt]

Hello,

We use it for some of our products and are quite pleased with the software.

PROS:

• Easy-to-use API
• Ability to check customers usage
• We can push updates of our applications directly to the customer
• We can select which features of the application the customer has access
• The developer is really responsive and always helpful in case of questions

CONS:

• The connexion to the server to check the licence validity can sometimes be quite slow
• If the application to build is really large, it may be best to build beforehand the application as a packed library and then build a small executable using BLT as it takes some times to perform some analysis before building

In conclusion, I recommend BLT

Feel free to contact me if you need further informations.