Product Licensing Enforcement Mechanisms

Alex N
Alex N
in TR Internal
We have a product that currently does not have any mechanism of license enforcing. Basically, this is a gentlemen agreement regarding how customer uses the product and its features. We want to add a mechanism that would allow enabling and disabling certain features of the product depend on the license the customer purchased and expiration dates. I would like to know what licensing models are used within Thomson Reuters for on premise products and what mechanisms and tools are used for licensing enforcement. For the licensing enforcement mechanisms I am especially interested in the tools that are used for licenses generation and management, license activation on client side, license validation. What are the pitfalls and best practices? Your help is appreciated.
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Answers

  • Scott.McVay
    Scott.McVay
    Did you get an answer through another pathway, Alex, or are you still looking? One of the architects or associate architects might be willing to talk about license keys. If you're still looking, I can point Bhavin Shah over here to take a stab at an answer.
  • Alex N
    Alex N
    Hi Scott. Thanks for looking at this post. I haven't got any answers on this topic from any sources yet. It would be a good starting point for me if you or Bhavin share you experience in products licensing. Thanks.
  • Scott.McVay
    Scott.McVay
    I pinged Bhavin and Sai with a link to this question to see if one of them can get you a step further along.
  • Bhavin Shah
    Bhavin Shah
    Bottom line from my description immediately below is, if you want something like below you will have to work with SAP, Prism, Onepass and most likely have a API available hosted somewhere on the Cobalt Platform. Here are the details: In case of existing Drafting Assistant the license key is actually a Registration Key from a dedicated Prism Domain for the Drafting Assistant Application. The Prism domain is driven by SAP subscriptions. At install time there is code to take in the supplied license key and checks that it is valid in the Drafting Assistant Prism Domain as well as retrieves the access controls that this Reg Key has in Prism. Based on that it provisions the user's install tree with choices as to which Drafting Assistant features will be presented to the user. Also, the Reg Key is checked every time the application is opened to validate that the license is still valid and has the right access. Note that the implementation is Drafting Assistant specific and not part of Cobalt Shared Platform. As part of transition of Drafting Assistant from "Legacy" dependencies to using Cobalt Shared Platform based constructs, the license key validation will not be done at install time. All of the artifacts will be laid down at install time. (BTW, this works out for Drafting Assistant as a large part of the application including the core end-user functionality is written in JS and does not need to be included in the installer package. Rather it is served up dynamically.) When the user uses the application they are asked for their Onepass username / password which should have a Westlaw Next Reg Key associated with it. Authorization is done using standard Cobalt FACs (which are still Prism access controls, btw) but on the Westlaw Next domain. I have heard that the other Desktop products in the Legal space - the Case Logistix / Case Notebook application use something called a Livenote license server but do not have any background on that. Also, at some point there was a conversation going on to see if we could consolidate License Key management. Not sure of the scope or outcome of that conversation either.
  • Alex N
    Alex N
    Bhavin, thanks for your reply. It is helpful. For those who are not familiar with the aforementioned tools and services see the links below. OnePass:
    https://thehub.thomsonreuters.com/docs/DOC-648170 Cobalt:
    https://thehub.thomsonreuters.com/groups/central-tech-cobalt-platform Prism:
    https://thehub.thomsonreuters.com/groups/prism
  • Alex N
    Alex N
    Bhavin, I have a few more questions with regards to what you posted. What is the role of SAP software in this schema? Could you please put more details on what this means "The Prism domain is driven by SAP subscriptions."? What tool/service is used to generate Reg Keys? Thanks!
  • Bhavin Shah
    Bhavin Shah
    This is a great overview diagram of the relationship between the systems that should help you give more clarity: Relations Between MIS Systems (UDS, P... | The Hub - [
    https://thehub.thomsonreuters.com/docs/DOC-687710][1] [1]:
    https://thehub.thomsonreuters.com/docs/DOC-687710 SAP is the back-end Order Processing system that has authoritative information about all our subscribed users, their subscriptions and access controls, billing related information and so on. Prism on the other hand is a combination of services (as far as I understand) including the security and user preferences services. The data for these services is derived from the information that is there in SAP. Specifically as to how SAP and Prism interact I do not have very detailed understanding as it is a separate group that we interact with. If you need specific contacts email me and I could find them out.

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