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Last Updated: 19th June 2009 07:28:19 pm

In many companies, regardless of their size, there is a demand for evaluations to be sent to potential customers.

These needs can be met either automatically or manually. Regardless, the process is usually similar. Your contact with a potential customer normally originates through sales channels or the corporate website. To set up the customer with a license, you acquire information such as name, company information, and email address. You then use the information to create and deliver to the prospect, for example, a node-locked license that expires 30 days from activation.

One recommended way to address this business case using License Distribution Service is to create a demo template related to the Product for which you want to enable evaluations.

With LM-X, this demo template could include typical information such as feature name, MAJOR_VERSION, MINOR_VERSION and an expiration date 30 days from activation. Additionally, the demo template should enforce a client-side hostid, CLIENT_HOSTID , that will lock your product to the particular machine on which it is being evaluated. You can do this by creating a client hostid list and adding a required hostid type, such as ETHERNET or any other valid LM-X hostid type to the TemplateAssignment object of the Order.

Finally, you would create an Entity called “Evaluations” which is a child of the root Entity. This lets you separate the evaluation licenses from other paying customers.

When creating the actual licenses, you would store the Customers and Orders inside this “Evaluations” Entity. To process the evaluation requests, you could start by creating a Customer with the name and company information obtained from the particular user. A website form can come in handy for this purpose, because you can enforce that the prospect enter required information before their request can be processed.

When you receive a request, you can create an Order using the demo template created for the product. With this, you can specify the name of the customer in the LICENSEE field of the license. Note that you can automate this by using the LICSERVICE_USE_CUSTOMER_COMPANY_AS_LICENSEE or LICSERVICE_USE_CUSTOMER_NAME_AS_LICENSEE keywords in the Order template’s feature setting.

The unactivated Order can then be activated by sending the associated Order ID to the customer email address. When the prospect receives the email, he or she can enter the Order ID directly into the application to send the missing ETHERNET hostid and retrieve the license.

An alternative to this method is to pre-generate several Order IDs, which can be given out at conferences, user meetings, and similar events. In such cases, you would not obtain customer information to validate a request, but instead set it to something identifiable, such as “Demo USER from user meeting XYZ”.

In addition to fulfilling evaluation requests, you would normally want to prohibit end-users from obtaining multiple evaluations. To prevent this, you should ensure that the hostid information is never duplicated and/or issue a warning if multiple emails come from the same domain name. License Distribution Service provides all the information necessary to let you implement such filters prior to fulfilling requests for evaluations.