Tag: software commercialisation

Sign up customers automatically for the customer portal

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A recent addition to the platform is the ability to sign up customers automatically to the customer portal. Instead of creating a customer manually or through the API, you can publish a generic link that will automatically register a customer with your account. This link can be found on the customer page.

In addition to allowing your customers to see their current licenses, the customer portal gives them the option to order new licenses as well as use their login credentials instead of the license key when unlocking your software. We will cover each case below.

Why customer portal?

Listing licenses

When you assign licenses to a customer account, your customers will be able to see all their licenses and their properties, such as the set of features they are entitled to and when they expire.

Recurring payments

If you have set up Stripe with your account, you can allow your customers to sign up for a plan in the customer portal and get instant access to a valid license key. They can also easily manage their subscriptions. You can read more about how you can get started here.

User account authentication

Instead of using a license key, you can allow your customers to authenticate using their login credentials. Cryptolens has developed a state-of-the-art protocol that preserves the privacy of your customers (more information about the protocol can be found here). You can read more on how to get started here.

Overdraft software licensing

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Several months ago, we introduced support for floating licenses, which, in simple terms, is a way to permit a certain number of concurrent end users at a time.

Overdraft license is a way to allow your users to temporarily exceed the upper bound of the number of concurrent licenses to take into account for potential peak usages. Once this occurs, a special event is going to be registered so that you can increase the limit in the next billing cycle.

In .NET, this can be implemented as follows (below, we allow the users to exceed the upper bound by one more concurrent license):

var auth = "{access token with permission to access the activate method}";
var result = Key.Activate(token: auth, parameters: new ActivateModel()
{
    Key = licenseKey,
    ProductId = 3349,
    Sign = true,
    MachineCode = Helpers.GetMachineCode(),
    FloatingTimeInterval = 100, // needed for floating licenses
    MaxOverdraft = 1            // needed to allow overdraft
});

if(Helpers.IsOnRightMachine(res2.LicenseKey, isFloatingLicense: true, allowOverdraft: true))
{
    // everything OK!
}

You can read more about this on our help pages.

New Analytics Dashboard for Software License Management

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Today, we are happy to share a new version of the analytics dashboard (available to all customers), which includes many new cool features. We will sum this up in this post. The new analytics dashboard will be improved continuously, with the aim to offer more in-depth analysis of the data.

If you have any feedback, we would be happy to hear from you!

Getting Started

  1. Login on your account: https://app.cryptolens.io/Account/Login
  2. Go to https://app.cryptolens.io/Stats
  3. Click on the link on the top of the page to visit the new page.

Note: After a while, the new page (https://analytics.cryptolens.io/index.html) will redirect you back to the old page. To view it again, you just need to click on the link again. We will fix this in the coming weeks.

Feature Walkthrough

World Map and Filters (by country)

To start with, you will see all the data that has accumulated since the beginning (“all time” option). You can control this easily with the 5 buttons available in the top menu (we will discuss how to set a custom time period a bit later).

The map allows you to examine stats from specific regions. You can select the desired countries and then click on “show/hide filters” and click on the “filter” button close to the country tags, as shown below (filtering on Sweden and Norway). Once we have activated the filter, it will turn blue. You can then click on the filter again and it will turn white, meaning it’s no longer active.

Timeline

If you are interested in a different time region than those supported on the top menu, you can use the timeline to select an area of interest. To reset the timeline, just double-tap on it.

Time of Day

One way to understand how your application is being used is by examining when it’s used during the day. This was already available in the old analytics dashboard. The key difference in the new one is that it takes into account the local time zone of the end user.

Most Active Customers and Other Metrics

The last part includes a short summary of the key metrics such as how many licenses were created and how many requests were made during a specific time period. Moreover, it’s now also possible to compare “how active” license keys and customers are relative to each other. For instance, in the customer list, you can see your top most active and inactive customers, which can help you to discover the early adopters in a technology adoption lifecycle model.