UNDERSTANDING SLASCONE – Help Center | SLASCONE

FUNDAMENTALS

SLASCONE is a modern licensing and analytics solution, born in the cloud era. Unlike legacy licensing solutions providing client libraries per platform and requiring the generation and activation of a new license key upon any license parameter change (e.g., expiration date, feature), SLASCONE’s approach is significantly simpler.

In a typical scenario, the software to be licensed/protected is activated (calling the SLASCONE API) only once. After the initial activation, your software periodically pulls/refreshes the actual license parameters from SLASCONE. Thus, the need to generate new license keys upon license parameter change becomes obsolete, resulting in a much more automated workflow for both vendors and licensees.

PORTALS

SLASCONE consists of 3 portals, with state of the art, web-based, MFA authentication:

LICENSING

With SLASCONE you can implement any named or floating user/device software licensing scenario.

ANALYTICS

Real-time analytics are essential for product managers to be able to understand the usage of their products. SLASCONE’s licensing and analytics modules work independently. You do not have to use the licensing module in order to use the analytics functionality.

OFFLINE SCENARIOS

Offline functionality is an issue for almost every software vendor, since it is very usual to have a small percentage of (completely or partially) offline installations. Since SLASCONE is an online solution, it is not ideal for completely/permanently offline environments. Despite the fact that no or limited connectivity prevents you from getting the best out of SLASCONE, you can still fulfil your basic licensing/protection requirements, as described here.

In most cases, a healthy compromise is to require a heartbeat (which means an online connection) during every software update. This does not only protect your software, but also ensures that you have the latest software version information for every installation.

COMMUNICATION FREQUENCY - HEARTBEATS

As a vendor you have to decide how often your software communicates with SLASCONE in order to pull/refresh the actual license parameters (heartbeat). Heartbeats constitute the fundament of SLASCONE.

Practically, heartbeats can be triggered in two ways:

Periodically: by implementing such a logic in your software. The heartbeat period is a license parameter that can be set in SLASCONE.
Manually: by giving the end user of your software the option to trigger a heartbeat, which means to refresh the licensing data.

MINIMUM HEARTBEAT PERIOD

The heartbeat period depends on your business model. Regardless of the business model though, it is recommended to at least:

Trigger a heartbeat every time a new version/hotfix of your software is installed.
Give your end users the option to manually trigger a heartbeat.

This minimum recommendation suffices for many business scenarios. Nevertheless, there are scenarios in which you must/can trigger additional heartbeats.

EXAMPLES

Let us now explain how this translates in some typical business scenarios:

Perpetual: In such a case, SLASCONE is mainly used in order to activate the license and ensure that this license code cannot be used again. Additional periodical heartbeats would only serve if license parameters change very frequently (e.g., new feature).
Subscription: After the initial activation, a heartbeat must be triggered as soon as the license expires. For example, in case of a yearly subscription, a heartbeat has to be triggered after 365 days. If the end user has renewed his subscription, the heartbeat succeeds and the cycle is reset. If not, the heartbeat fails due to the expired license and the software is blocked.
Software Version binding: For scenarios in which the end user has licensed Release 12.0 but not 13.0 thus being allowed to use the software as long as he does not upgrade to Version 13.0. The minimum heartbeat recommendation is sufficient for this scenario, since during the installation/upgrade process, a heartbeat is triggered. SLASCONE returns a not compliant software version and the software is blocked.