Migrate to Cryptolens from a third party licensing system

In this post we will cover the steps necessary to migrate to Cryptolens licensing solution from a different licensing provider.

The idea

In sum, the idea is to issue new licenses to existing clients using Cryptolens and allow the software to be used with the old system for a limited period of time. Practically, there are at least two ways it can be done. We will cover the general idea below and then discuss the practical side further down in the article.

Method 1: In the first method, you could replace the old third party licensing solution with Cryptolens in a new release of your software, as well as provide all existing customers with a license key from Cryptolens. This way, those users who have not upgraded yet would not be affected.

Method 2: Similar to the first method, except that you could keep the old system alongside Cryptolens in the new release and phase out the old system over a longer period of time.

If you the old licensing system requires an active subscription to verify licenses, there would be a point at which old customers would be forced to upgrade. You can choose how long this period should be based on how many users have upgraded to the latest release. If the licensing system that you used before does not require a subscription to work, then no further action is necessary and existing users using older versions of your software would be unaffected.

Practical implementation

Q: How to re-issue licenses to existing users so that they can activate newer versions of the software that use Cryptolens?

This depends on the number of customers and licenses that you have in the old system. If it’s just a few, the easiest way would be to issue the licenses manually. However, if you have hundreds of licenses and customers, we would suggest to use our Web API to automate it. There are two ways this can be accomplished:

Method 1: You can iterate through all the licenses in your old licensing system and then call CreateKey method to issue a license in Cryptolens.

Method 2: If you have a website already, you could create a page where customers can enter their old license key and then obtain a new license key from Cryptolens. To obtain a new license key from Cryptolens, you can call CreateKey method. It’s important to keep track of the old licenses that have already received a new license in Cryptolens, so that if a customer attempts to enter the same license again, they receive the previously issued license key in Cryptolens.