How do I activate offline customers after office hours or in an emergency?

A customer may have an unexpected computer crash or other issues that result in them needing to activate your software again. If you only allow offline activations and are not using SOLO Server, the customer would have to wait for you to respond to their activation request, which can potentially be an issue if the customer needs to run your software again immediately. One possible solution is to allow your application to run as a limited trial the first time it is installed on a new machine, which would allow the customer to use the software for a limited time until they could complete a new activation. You would have to determine if this would be appropriate for your software or not.

Using SOLO Server

The better solution would be to use SOLO Server, which provides a variety of ways for your customers to activate your software both online and offline which do not require any intervention from you or your staff. This can ensure that your customers can get up and running again at any time, which is especially useful if they are located on the opposite side of the world.

With online activations, the customer needs to enter their License ID and Password into the software, and it will activate automatically.

For offline activations, a customer would normally call in or email their activation request to you, and you would generate the activation response to send back to them. With SOLO Server, as long as they have access to another computer with Internet access, they can submit their activation request to SOLO Server through a web browser and get back the activation response immediately. This supports both trigger code activation, which exchanges numeric codes (see this topic for details), as well as Protection PLUS 5 SDK's manual activation process, which uses XML data (PLUSManaged and PLUSNative manual topics).

The customer would need at least one Activation Left on their license to successfully complete a new activation. If they have run out of activations on their license, we also support allowing a customer to remotely deactivate a previous installation to free up that activation for a new computer. This allows the customer to manage their licenses without requiring your support. With SOLO Server, you still have complete control over updating or revoking the licenses if necessary, so it is possible to issue a customer an additional activation on their license if you want to.