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Hello,

I just take a look on the API and the new licence manager. This is a real improvement compare to licencing software of the TPLA.

You said that is only for software sold through the LVTN. If I moved my licencing from TPLA to this, can I generate activation code directly to send it to my customer, or I need to ask my customer to buy it from LabVIEW Tools Network ?

I'm asking that, because we are selling TestStand add-on built with LabVIEW. For the moment there is no built-in function to manage easily our product activation compare to LabVIEW. We built all by ourself based on TPLA. This new SDK can be a solution. But we want to keep the ability to sell it easily and directly to our customer if we include our toolkit in a bigger project.

We also hope that one day we can publish TestStand addon on the NI Tools Network and not on the LabVIEW Tools Network. NI tools Network make more sense for tools dedicated to any NI Software.

Best Regards

Hi Maxime,

Thank you for your questions.  Due to the tight integration of NILM and the NI purchasing process, products that use NILM can only be sold on the LabVIEW Tools Network.  You're welcome to create an alternate version of the software that uses a different licensing system for selling through your own channel, but you would not be able to generate NILM licenses unless a purchase is made through ni.com.

I hope this helps,

David

Hi David,

thanks for the reply. If we use a solution, we will use only one solution. Using 2 different ways to activate a software depending on sales channel is not a good idea.

I have 2 other question : With the Toolkit, during development, can we do some real test with online activation without paying everything ? We can do it with Softwarekey and it's very helpful to test and validate activation.

What about using our tools as internal use ? The best way to validate a product, is to use it and often, we use out tool for different project and in this case we use the final product. We used specific licence that cost nothing for us. Is this possible with NI Licence Manager ?

Best regards.

Please forgive my delay in responding, it's been a busy week over here.

To answer your questions, yes you are able and highly encouraged to do real activation testing with your toolkit during development.  When you are ready to start development, our team will send you a license file at no cost which will be your actual real license file for your product.  When your development is complete and we're ready to sell your product, we'll make the necessary changes in the back end to attach it to a real part number and make it activatable for real customers.  

Regarding your second question:  When your product goes live as described above, we'll also send you a real serial number for internal use only.  Your team would use this serial number for testing, validation, internal development, etc at no cost, however you would never give this to a customer.  If you have customers who are using your software (either purchased by itself, or as part of a system) they would need to purchase a license of your software from ni.com in the same way that they would have to purchase a copy of LabVIEW or other NI Software part of the same system.  

I hope this is clear, but let me know if you have further questions,

David

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply.

This is clear for me now.

Best regards

Hello, 

I am curious if using the NI License Manager Third-Party SDK would make the Third-Party toolkit also available for Central Licensing (with NI VLM and/or FlexNet Publisher)?

Many thanks

Michaela

Hello,

I am thinking to use NILM for licensing application my company provides.

The problem is, that we would like to license one application exe, but generate separate license key for each instance/copy of our application. Then we have some control on our software.

Is it possible?

Hi,

We are using the NI License Manager API in our Application for Licensing Purposes.

We observe that "License Status API" does not provide the real-time license status when used in continuous running modules.

Our license module runs continuously and when we tried to deactivate or activate our application from the license Manager, the License status was not updated properly and we got the same license status as that of during the start of the execution.

To get the current license status, either we need to restart the instance of the current module or run a single-time execution VI in another Application instance.

Is there any other option to Check the NILM license status continuously in the main instance?

We tried to confirm the same using the examples located at the below location and were able to get the same result.

Please find the steps below,

Steps:

1. Run the NILM API Example Basic.vi located at "C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2021\examples\NI License Manager\NILM API Example Basic.vi"

2. Activate the License with the Key given in the Front panel.

3. Once Activated open NI License Manager to confirm the License Status.

4. Run the License_NI.vi (From Snippet - LV21) and try running it once to confirm the same License Status.

5. Run the License_NI_Continous.vi (From Snippet - LV21) and now deactivate the license from NI License Manager.

6. We can notice that the Status is not reflecting properly as shown below.