NetLicensing Object Model
Vendor
Vendor is a licensor that uses NetLicensing service for managing the licenses for his products. Vendor registers with NetLicensing by opening an account. Vendor configures his products and desired licenses within the NetLicensing service via NetLicensing Management Console. Besides, vendor has to integrate NetLicensing service into his products by means of NetLicensing API.
Product
Product of the vendor within NetLicensing. Usually it corresponds to an actual product of the vendor, but variations possible - in some cases it may be feasible to configure two or more separate products within NetLicensing for a single actual product of the vendor. Licensing rules are defined for each product individually, products are completely independent of each other in terms of license management.
Product Module
Product may comprise of multiple modules, but must have at least one. Each module is licensed using one of the Licensing Models offered by NetLicensing service. Licensing within a module is independent of other modules, however all modules belonging to a product are visible to every licensee of the product.
License Template
License template is a configuration element that is bound to a module. License templates define concrete items available for obtaining by a licensee, specifying what is an item, its price, amount (if applicable), etc. Actual licenses created off these templates are then given to licensees.
Licensing Model
Licensing model is a set of rules and algorithms that define how to process the licenses obtained by a licensee. A number of licensing models is supported by NetLicensing service, refer to the licensing models documentation for details.
License
Licenses are cloned off the corresponding templates when a licensee obtain them. Licenses always belong to a certain licensee. Collection of all licenses that belong to a licensee are processed by a licensing model(s) on validation request (sent via NetLicensing API), and the validation result is then sent back for further processing on the vendor/end user side.
Licensee
Licensee is usually an end customer, capable of obtaining licenses for the product. From the vendor perspective a licensee may correspond to a physical instance of the product, customer account within a vendor’s service, or it can be an USB dongle given to a product user. In practice, a licensee must only have a unique identifier associated with it, that is communicated to NetLicensing for performing operations related to this licensee. Licensee doesn’t need to have an own account within NetLicensing. There are two main operations performed for licensee: validation and obtaining new licenses. Validation process is typically completely transparent to the licensee and performed from the product by means of NetLicensing API. Licensee can be offered to obtain new licenses for the product by redirecting him to the NetLicensing Shop in web browser.
Transaction
Transaction is created each time a new bunch of licenses is obtained by a licensee. It can be either a direct purchase by a licensee via NetLicensing Shop, licenses can be given to a licensee by a vendor, or assigned implicitly by NetLicensing if it is defined so by some license model (e.g. evaluation license may be given automatically). All these events are reflected in transactions.
Bundle
Bundle stores license templates for different product modules, but all templates in a bundle belong to the same product. It is used to create an array of licenses based on the saved license templates.