Sept. 4, 2008
Check out our new
MSDN site!. I think you will agree that the new layout and quick links to content like the Getting Started Guide, Featured Resources and tutorials & videos are a huge improvement. In addition to simplifying the layout, we’ve also added some great new content. Roz, our writer, has been creating content for this site as well on working on the documentation for the next generation of the SLP Online Service that you will be able to see in October.
Three specific items I’d like to highlight are 2 new articles and the C++ tutorial. The first article is a Walkthrough:
Integrating Activation into a Setup Project. In this piece Roz outlines the steps and code required for successful integration with setup. For those of you who are deploying applications on non- English Windows Operating systems, I want you to be aware of a problem with permissions you might encounter – and more importantly, how you can work around it.
Click here for the technical details. Finally, we often get the question: “Can I protect and license my native Microsoft Win32® application? The answer is: Yes, you can license your Win32 application and now we have a
C++ tutorial to show you how. SLP Services does not provide a mechanism to protect native code like we have to protect managed code. However, we have
partners such as Arxan Technologies, that can protect native code and work with SLP Online Services.
-John Dietz, Group Manager, SLP Services
July 16, 2008
It was great meeting all of you who attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this year in Houston. For those of you didn’t make it, we announced our
new pricing and SKUs. I’d also like to call your attention to two new case studies we published,
Mindjet and
PreEmptive Solutions. Mindjet is an ISV with about 200 employees that makes the popular MindManager software. Like many other companies in the software industry they initially wrote their own licensing and activation scheme. After an internal audit however, Mindjet discovered a significant number of product keys had been lost (or worse). Mindjet was able to implement SLP Services both within their product as well as within their back office in a matter of months resulting in a reduction of builds from 14 to 4. But don’t take my word for it, read the Mindjet case study. The PreEmptive Solutions case study is a lesson in how to make money as a VAR of SLP Services. As a leading provider of .NET code protection technology, PreEmptive created an integrated solution offering with the SLP Services licensing and activation service.
During the WPC keynote, Stephan Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division,
announced two new suites of subscription services while noting that
where customers choose to run their software (cloud or local) will remain up to them. Our team remains excited to work with ISVs who also want to pursue flexible business models.
-John Dietz, Group Manager, SLP Services
June 16, 2008
You spoke, we listened. That is going to be the SLP Services mantra at the
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this year. We’ve had a lot of feedback in our
forums, at conferences and via
slpsinfo@microsoft.com over the past 8 months since we launched. While I can’t divulge the details of what we will announce at WPC, I can talk about the core theme: we are going to lower the barrier to entry for small, medium and large ISVs to adopt a licensing strategy. We’ll be doing what Microsoft does best: bringing technology solutions to the broadest possible audience. And in our case, this means the largest number of ISVs. You can expect SLP Services to be simpler and more affordable than ever before.
If you won’t be attending the Worldwide Partner Conference, stay tuned to this website. Our site will go live with announcement details on July 8th. In the meantime we’re working on more case studies and content.
-John Dietz, Group Manager, SLP Services
May 23, 2008
We just posted a new
SLP Services case study on Microsoft.com. It features Softedge Systems, a company who was able to add trial capability to their DocsAlive product in a very short period of time. According to their CEO, Vikas Sahni, one of the key reasons for adopting SLP Services was to protect their revenue. While revenue protection was the primary goal, Softedge was happy to discover that the solution was “easy to implement.” Here is an excerpt from the case study:
Softedge Systems began testing SLP Services in December 2007 and within one month the solution was fully implemented. “We were able to go from start of evaluation to completion of implementation in a two-person month,” Sahni says. “We spent over 14 person months trying to implement other solutions—time we could have spent bringing DocsAlive to the market sooner…”
-John Dietz, Group Manager, SLP Services
May 16, 2008
On April 21st I was fortunate to talk to a group of developers at Dev Connections in Orlando. I was talking about SLP Services and the question of “who uses these innovative business models to address specific customer segments anyway?” came up. Once again I was able to cite the company I work for, Microsoft, and a new project code-named Albany. Albany is a subscription version of Microsoft Office bundled with a variety of other services. An overview of Albany was outlined in a recent CNET
article.
-John Dietz, Group Manager, SLP Services
May 14, 2008
Welcome to the new Software Licensing and Protection Services blog. We’ve had a team
blog for quite some time but that is mainly for developers. This blog will consist of observations from my team and other Microsoft folks on evolving software business models. Don’t read this as the official Microsoft, be all end all on business models. Read this as a view from the trenches, as we work with ISVs daily, helping companies make more money from the software they create.
-Thomas Lindeman, Director, SLP Services