or “What just happened to my 2008.1 keys?”
Back at RoundUp 2007, I presented the WebWorks ePublisher 2008 road map. Development was excited to start work on the new feature set. We were also a bit overwhelmed by the tasks we had set for ourselves: full FrameMaker 8 and Vista support (delivered with 2008.1), Eclipse Help (delivered with 2008.2), and wiki publishing to MoinMoin and MediaWiki servers (delivered with 2008.3). Everyone was pumped up about the new offerings, especially our Sales team.
And then someone asked the question, “How do we limit these features to folks on the new release?”
Um, new license keys?
Well, new license keys are one way to do it, but they really aren’t a great solution. You see, we issue keys per feature and per product. In the simplest case, that means at least 2 keys per order. For users who leverage our full platform, that number could increase up to 6 or even 9 keys per order. Now, consider that someone is supposed to deploy 6 or 9 keys to 20-30 members of their organization. That’s a real problem for a company like WebWorks who want to fit in and do well in the Enterprise market. And its no fun for small shops either.
So what to do about it.
