The Basics of Licensing

There are two basic types of licenses for our software products, full and limited licenses. Typically, customers receive a full license, whereas partners and potential buyers receive a limited license. "Limitations" can be an expiration date, a maximum number of write operations, or both. A full license has no such limitations. Independently of this, several components are available for CMS Fiona which must be licensed individually and show up in the licensee's license file if they are.

After the terms of licensing and, if applicable, the contractual agreements between JustRelate Group GmbH and the customer, partner, or potential buyer have been made, the following steps need to be made to technically invoke the license:

  1. Using a tool available in the download area, the licensee generates the machine-specific data we require to create the license file, and sends us this data. This step is only required for licensing CMS Fiona 6.7.0 or later.

  2. The licensee receives a license file (typically license.xml) from us and copies it into one or more directories of the CMS directory tree. Afterwards, the software components concerned need to be restarted.

The license file needs to be present in the config directory of the instance concerned. For the Portal Manager, the location of the license file can be configured as the value of the licenseFile context parameter in the web.xml file of the PM web application. The PDF Generator, which is also a web application, expects the file to be located in its WEB-INF directory.

A license file for version 6.7 or later of our software might look like this, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
  <signature></signature>
  <license>
    <licenseId>123456</licenseId>
    <owner>The Name of The Receiving Company</owner>
    <issueDate>2008-04-01</issueDate>
    <restrictions>Restrictions for this license as free text.</restrictions>
    <expirationDate>2008-04-01</expirationDate>
    <version>6.7</version>
    <machine>
      <machineId />
      <cores>2</cores>
      <cmConcurrentUsers>20</cmConcurrentUsers>
      <cmIdLimit>10000</cmIdLimit>
      <cmFloatingLicense>false</cmFloatingLicense>
      <rc>true</rc>
      <pm>true</pm>
      <ses>true</ses>
      <eop>true</eop>
      <filter>true</filter>
      <pdfGenerator>true</pdfGenerator>
      <contentService>true</contentService>
    </machine>
  </license>
</configuration>

Elements of a License File

The information relevant for the license are contained in the license subelement. They include administrative information as well as information about the software components the license covers. The administrative data includes the following:

  • licenseId: the serial number of the license
  • owner: the licensee (e.g. the name of the company)
  • issueDate: the issue date
  • version: the version number of the products covered by the license (all our software products have the same version number). If the third or the second and the third part of the version number has not been specified , the license covers all subversions not explicitly specified.
  • restrictions: a description of the restrictions, if applicable
  • expirationDate: the expiration date for licenses that are temporally limited. For unlimited licenses, this element is empty or not present

The information about the software components covered by the license are contained in machine elements which are subelements of the license element. Each machine element refers to a uniquely identifiable computer and defines the scope of the license for this computer. The following information serves to specify this scope:

  • machineId: the identifier that identifies a computer
  • cores: the maximum number of CPU cores the computer on which the license is used may have
  • cmConcurrentUsers: the maximum number of users (CU) that can simultaneously be logged-in to the Content Manager (CM)
  • cmIdLimit: for demo or test licenses the maximum counter value that can be assigned to entities such as CMS files, links, file formats, etc. If this value has been reached, write access is no longer possible. For no limitation, the value is unlimited
  • cmFloatingLicense: for a CM with several instances this value specifies whether the concurrent users may be assigned dynamically to the instances or not (true or false, respectively)
  • rc, pm, ses, eop, filter, pdfGenerator, contentService: the components covered by the license (true or false). The CM is licensed by means of the concurrent users and the ID limitation

The license element can contain more than one machine element. In this case the license file can be used on all computers defined in the license.