Dear Users,
In the past months, many things have changed. The Web API was extended with new methods (focus on statistics) and the control panel itself received some new functions. Apart from that, as some of you might have noticed, there were some down times also. In this letter, I would like to describe our plan to tackle the down times, shortly mention the new features, and finally stress that Web API 1 will be discontinued.
Downtime
I think this is quite a familiar concept to many of us; it basically means that, for some reasons, the web application is unable to respond to some or all requests. We’ve experienced several down times starting from January 2015 (3-4). Some were quite short and rarely noticeable, whilst the recent ones were quite long. The reasons varied, but many depended on the infrastructure where the application is currently stored, which is provided by another company.
For some applications, a downtime once in a while might not be of big importance. For Serial Key Manager (SKM), this is not the case. The response time of our application is a vital aspect, mainly because of the way SKM is being used. If the application is not accessible, users that depend on a valid key validation/activation will not be able to access the software.
In order to ensure that your customers are always able to work with your application, there is a series of measures that are going to be taken.
- New servers: In the nearest time, we are going to upgrade the infrastructure. This means faster servers and reduced (if any) downtime.
- Private hosting: This means that you will be able to host SKM on your own servers.
- Simplified offline key validation: Since implementation of periodic key validation (even with small intervals) is a good way to enable access to the application even during a downtime, our aim is to simplify the way it is implemented. At the moment, you can read this article to get a pre-configured solution. However, the goal is to reduce this to a single method call.
If there is anything else you think we should do, please let us know here. I must admit that we’ve had constructive conversations with many SKM users these months. It’s important to keep up the friendly atmosphere where all of us can exchange ideas in order to achieve a great licensing solution! (please fill in the form to rate these ideas)
New features
Let’s now take a look at some of the new features that were added/will be added to SKM.
- Payment Forms – a hosted payment form that will allow you to integrate the Web API together with PayPal and Stripe. A draft of the knowledge base article can be found here. The feature itself is expected to work. See an example (live).
- Web API methods
- Get Activated Machines – list the activated machines for a given key (includes ip, machine code, time).
- Web API Log – get the Web API log for your account, a product or a key.
- Stats – or Analytics. It’s an easy way to get a quick overview of your account, a product or a key.
Web API 1
As it was mentioned in this article, Web API will be discontinued. We’ve now removed all documentation, but the API itself is still working. Within 10 days from now, we plan to turn it off completely. If this will affect you negatively, please let us know so that we can come to a solution.
Conclusion
In this letter, we went through the strategy to decrease the impact of/reduce downtime. Later, we briefly looked at the new features (payment forms & analytics). Finally, it was stressed that Web API 1 will be discontinued soon. If anyone would have some questions, please contact us!
/Artem