B
Brian
Anyone have any suggestions on licensing methods & enforcement for custom
Access programs (i.e. licensing my apps to customers)?
In particular, I need two things. I can think of a number of ways to do
them, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if someone already has a piece
of code out there for it (besides that, the one that's out there is likely to
better than my wheel).
1. Auto-creating an expiration date in a demo version based on date of first
use. Here's one way I have considered, obviously staying away from storing an
expiration date in a table due to the almost inherent lack of security
evident a clever user ODBC's his way directly to the table and figures out
how to extend the demo date:
-Create a global variable
-Leave it null
-Have VBA check for a null value
-If null, open the code module and insert a value for the variable of today
+ 30 & save the module
-If not null, compare the variable to Date() and deny access if the variable
is <= Date().
2. License key creation with some measure of piracy-protection (i.e. license
key validation). With a limited number of customers, I suppose I could just:
-Create a developer-side utility that multiplies the year by the day by the
customer ID and gives me the result.
-Create a customer-side utility that requires this key for activation, but
This would require the customer to call me every time the program is
installed, and I'm sure that would get old in a hurry.
Pardon my kindergarten approach to this. I suppose it's a nice problem to
have, this business of having enough customers that I have to think about
licensing, but one I have not had to consider until now. With my luck,
there's probably a CreateLicense method in Access somewhere, and I've just
never seen it.
I know that ideally, I should write a web services-enabled routine to send
the customer information to a centralized & web-enabled (i.e. web services,
perhaps) database to unlock the specific copy, then again to lock it upon
uninstallation, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.
Access programs (i.e. licensing my apps to customers)?
In particular, I need two things. I can think of a number of ways to do
them, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if someone already has a piece
of code out there for it (besides that, the one that's out there is likely to
better than my wheel).
1. Auto-creating an expiration date in a demo version based on date of first
use. Here's one way I have considered, obviously staying away from storing an
expiration date in a table due to the almost inherent lack of security
evident a clever user ODBC's his way directly to the table and figures out
how to extend the demo date:
-Create a global variable
-Leave it null
-Have VBA check for a null value
-If null, open the code module and insert a value for the variable of today
+ 30 & save the module
-If not null, compare the variable to Date() and deny access if the variable
is <= Date().
2. License key creation with some measure of piracy-protection (i.e. license
key validation). With a limited number of customers, I suppose I could just:
-Create a developer-side utility that multiplies the year by the day by the
customer ID and gives me the result.
-Create a customer-side utility that requires this key for activation, but
This would require the customer to call me every time the program is
installed, and I'm sure that would get old in a hurry.
Pardon my kindergarten approach to this. I suppose it's a nice problem to
have, this business of having enough customers that I have to think about
licensing, but one I have not had to consider until now. With my luck,
there's probably a CreateLicense method in Access somewhere, and I've just
never seen it.
I know that ideally, I should write a web services-enabled routine to send
the customer information to a centralized & web-enabled (i.e. web services,
perhaps) database to unlock the specific copy, then again to lock it upon
uninstallation, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that yet.
