Hi Battler,
Nothing has neccessarily changed regarding the licensing VIs for stand-alone applications, however it should not be too difficult of a process. You would first use the Concept Software Protection PLUS software to create license files for your application, and then call the Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit licensing VIs from within your application to determine if the license is valid or not.
In terms of support, Concept Software will support helping you create the license files, and this forum and our team at NI will support the Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit and it's VIs. If you have any questions or specific problems you've run into, please bring them up so we can help you out or fix the problems in future versions of the toolkit.
If you need basic licensing for an application and adding the Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit API to your application is too much work, we suggest using the InstantPLUS software which will wrap your LabVIEW-built application with licensing without any additional work in LabVIEW. This is supported fully by Concept Software and we've had many partners use this solution for LabVIEW applications with great success.
To respond to your specific questions addressed on this tutorial document:
- What's the actual process for activating software in use by the client? Do you need to manually generate licence files? Activation of the software is done using the Protection PLUS software or the SOLO Server. A user can either automatically activate their software using the activation Web Service built into InstantPLUS (similar to the way LabVIEW is automatically activated over the internet) or you can also allow manual activation in which a customer would call you and provide you with codes specific to their computer. You would then use LFEdit (part of Protection PLUS) to create activation codes to give back to them. Again this is similar to LabVIEW's manual activation process.
- How does this (licence files) tie with InstantPlus? - I think I answered this above, but let me know if I misunderstand the question.
- How do you implement trial versions and activate/de-activate features? Is it easy? - With InstantPLUS the trial version of the software is automatically generated and the user can demo the product right out of the box. If you want your trial to have partial functionality and activate/deactivate certain features depending on the license type, they you would need to use the Third Party Licensing & Activation Toolkit licensing API.
- "web activation URL" - what do I need to implement to allow user to automatically activate. - This is the URL for the Manual Web Activation and requires you to have a SOLO account on softwarekey.com or to have your own custom SOLO server set up. If you are using a softwarekey.com account, then the default is http://secure.softwarekey.com/solo/unlock/. For automatic activation, you need to set the "activation server name" and "activation server URL". For more information on these inputs, see the detailed help for the VIs.
Let me know if there is more I can do to help.
