Version 20 - License Codes and Activations
New license management system in version 20
From version 20 onwards, all the EZ suite applications use a new license management system, which is based on the software licensing platform Zentitle provided by Nalpeiron. This means license keys from version 16 and older will not work with version 20.
The new license management system has several advantages:
There is only one license code for a suite of products, whatever its composition, while in previous versions you had to apply a license key for each individual product. The new license code needs to be applied only once.
The license code can be automatically updated when any of its settings changes. The same license code can evolve during time, by adding or removing products, changing their versions, their expiration date, the number of allowed activations, or any other settings managed through a license code. With the new system, there is no need to re-apply the license code. The information is updated automatically and transparently.
To allow this flexibility, the licensing solution checks on a regular basis the current status of the license. This is done by providing a temporally lease for the license, for a certain period of time, which can be from a few hours to several months.
Since a license code now handles a suite as a unique entity, the products that compose a suite cannot be split on multiple computers and used individually.
There are 2 ways to get a lease for a license: Online and Offline.
Online (default)
When a direct connection to the internet is possible from the computer (Online), the licensing management is fully transparent. The system regularly updates and checks the license status on the computer.
Usually, it can handle most proxy settings. Setting the proxy accordingly in the product to ensure a connection to our servers and Nalpeiron’s server can remove all the extra steps of an Offline registration.
The only issue we have with proxies today, is that the Nalpeiron system does not handle "Auto-detect proxy settings". If this is your case, you will have to set proxy settings manually.
Offline
If the computer has no access to the internet, or our product cannot connect to our servers or Nalpeiron’s server, then the Offline registration process must be used.
This generates a unique certificate that needs to be sent in the end to Nalpeiron’s server to get a final license certificate. This is fully handled by the Offline registration process in the product. This final license certificate will then be applied on the computer. It provides a lease for the license that will need to be refreshed on its expiration, which is by default 30 days.
To handle the offline registration process, we offer 2 ways: by email or using a browser, where the browser can be from any another computer.
The first one will always be a bit slower, since we are fully depending on mail servers and their latency.
The second one, using a browser, has the advantage to be immediate: the final certificate is generated as soon as you hit the send button. An email is sent with this certificate, but there is also a link available on the result page, which allows you to download directly the final certificate files, and thus avoid the wait for the email. Using the browser is usually quite fast (less than 2 minutes).
Details about Online or Offline registration can be found on this page.
License activation - what are the rules?
Every time a lease is provided for a license Online or Offline, it will be counted as one activation. When an existing lease is renewed, it will not count a new activation, but instead it will update the current activation.
Each license code has a finite number of concurrent activations that are allowed. It will be defined by the license that has been purchased. When this number of allowed activations has been reached, all new activation will be refused by the system.
The license information is stored in the current user environment with a session on the Windows system. This means that 2 different users on the same computer will count as 2 activations.
The Online and the Offline registration are not using the same references, so Online to Offline activations will count as 2 separate activations.
Each Virtual Machine will count as one activation.
Windows with Hyper-V enabled will be seen as a Virtual machine. There are rare cases where each lease renewal may be seen as a new activation on such computer. Please contact Ytria support to get some help to resolve this situation.
The Nalpeiron license management will keep any activation “effective”, pending a lease renewal, even if its last lease has expired several months ago. Such activations will be counted, in addition to the ones that still have a lease that has not expired yet.