Preparing Your Licensing Plan
A useful step in the development of a licensing strategy is the preparation of a licensing plan. Business decision-makers in your organization, such as product managers or marketing managers, define protection and business rules, and specify the licensing business models required to meet your company’s business needs.
A licensing business model is the logic behind a business decision relating to the way a Product is licensed. For example, a rental licensing business model enables you to charge for the use of software for a specific period of time.
Sentinel LDK enables you to choose from a variety of out-of-the-box licensing business models, including:
>Trialware (try-before-you-buy)
>Rental/Subscription
>Module-based
>Feature-based
>Floating users
>Time-based
>Execution-based
>Perpetual
>Unlocked
You can define additional licensing business models and software usage terms to meet your company’s individual requirements.
It is recommended that you prepare a licensing plan before you start to use Sentinel LDK to streamline the implementation of your company’s licensing strategy. Your Sentinel LDK licensing plan should be based on the detailed licensing requirements that you define for all the protected software applications to be sold by your company, and/or distributed for trial use.
The process of preparing a Sentinel LDK licensing plan can include the following steps:
1.Analyzing all the relevant software applications and identifying each functional component that can be licensed individually.
2.Combining these components into licensed entities that can be offered to customers.
3.Deciding which Sentinel protection keys you want to supply with your software applications.
4.Specifying the detailed licensing terms to be applied, according to your licensing strategy.
The output of such a process is a comprehensive licensing plan that can be implemented using Sentinel LDK-EMS.
NOTE You can make changes to your licensing plan and licensing business models at any time.