2021:Grooper Licensing (Service)

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This article is about an older version of Grooper.

Information may be out of date and UI elements may have changed.

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Grooper Licensing is a Grooper Service that distributes licenses to multiple workstations running Grooper applications.

Grooper can be licensed in two ways:

  • stand-alone
  • self hosted


For "stand-alone" installations, a single license is activated and registered to a local machine.


For "self hosted" installations, you can use a licensed installation as a server to hand out licenses to client machines.

  • In this case, the licensed machine will run a Grooper service, called Grooper Licensing.
  • The client Grooper installations will then call to the service to receive their licensing, using a URL.
  • This way, a single product license can be used to register multiple Grooper installations over a shared network.


The Grooper Licensing service is installed and started on the host server using Grooper Config.  Once the service is installed and running, client machines can access licensing via a connection URL referenced using the License Server URL property of a Grooper Repository's Root Node in Grooper Design Studio.

FYI

Once the Grooper Licensing service is installed and running on a server, the server running the service is often referred to as the "Grooper License Server" or just "License Server".

Licensing Grooper to an Individual Machine

This is a prerequisite to installing the Grooper Licensing service and creating a "self hosted" licensed installation. You must have an activated license in order for the service to hand out licensing information to client workstations!

  • The steps below describe how to activate a license on the host server.
  • Importantly, the machine running the Grooper Licensing service (i.e. the host machine/server) must be the one that initially registers and activates the license.


FYI

If you only complete the steps below, you will have created a "stand-alone" licensed installation.

  • Grooper will only be licensed to the machine ID activating the license.

Obtain a Grooper License

Frist, you will need to obtain a Grooper license in order to register and activate your installation. You may receive your license in one of two ways.

  1. As a license key.
    • This is by far the most common method. You will receive a serial number key you can use to activate the product online (something like "a1bc2de3-12a3-a123-a1b2345c6de7")
  2. As a license package.
    • This is much less common. A license package is a ".lic" file you can use to activate the product. This is typically used for "locked down" environments where activating online is not an option.
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If you are planning on installing a Grooper Licensing service to hand out licenses to other workstations, the machine activating the license must be the one to install the service.

If you try to install the Grooper Licensing service on a product that has not activated a license as described in the next steps, it will fail to distribute licensing to other machines.

Open Grooper Config

License activation and management is performed in the Grooper Config application. Open Grooper Config and you will immediately see two things relating to licensing.

  1. The License property will inform you if the product has activated and registered a license. In this case, we have not registered a license yet. So, the property informs us No License Found.
  2. The "Manage License..." button. This button will navigate us to a license activation window.
FYI License activation changed somewhat in Grooper version 2021. Prior to this version, license activation was performed in Grooper Design Studio. As of Grooper 2021, license activation is performed in Grooper Config.

Activate the License

  1. Press the "Manage License..." button.
  2. The "Manage Licese" window will appear.
  3. Select the Activation Method property and use the dropdown menu to choose how you're activating the license.
    • For this tutorial we will choose OnlineActivation. This is the most common method, activating online with a serial number key.

  1. Select the Serial Number property.
  2. Enter your license serial number key.
  3. Press the execute button to activate your license.

  1. Upon successful license activation, you will see the following notification.
  2. Press the "OK" button to continue.

Verify Your License

After activating your license, you will see the License property change from No License Found to Installed. It will also list your company's name (or who the license is registered to).

You can also view more specific information about your license from Grooper Config.

  1. Select the License property.
  2. Press the ellipsis button at the end.
  3. This brings up a window displaying basic information about your license: the serial number used to activate Grooper, the licensee name, its expiration and last time the license was reset.
  4. Select the Licenses property and press the ellipsis button at the end to view even more specific information about your license.

This will bring you a window displaying the specifics of your product license, including licensed OCR engines, how many concurrent connections to Grooper Design Studio can be made, volume licensing, and worker thread licensing.

Self Hosted Licensing: Installing a Grooper Licensing Service

Once a license has been activated on a machine, you can distribute licensing to client workstations by installing a Grooper Licensing service. This makes the single licensed machine a host, serving licenses to multiple machines. Installing the Grooper Licensing service is the first step in creating a "self hosted" licensing setup.

  • Grooper Services are various executable applications that run as a Windows Service to aid Grooper.
  • The Grooper Licensing service will allow one licensed machine to hand out licensing information to other workstations.
  • To do this, the machine installing the service must have an installed version of Grooper that has been activated with a product key or licensing package.

Open Grooper Config

Services are installed and configured in the Grooper Config application.

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You must run Grooper Config as an administrator to install, configure, start and stop services.

Add a New Service

  1. Press the "Edit Services..." button to add a new service.

This will bring up a Service Manager window to install, configure and otherwise manage Grooper services.

  1. Press the "Install..." button.
  2. This will bring up a window to install a Grooper Service.
  3. Select Grooper Licensing
  4. Press the "OK" button to continue.

  1. Grooper Licensing runs as a web service. Client machines will point to the host machine, port number and URL path indicated here via the Connection URL.
    • The settings here are populated by default. However, you can edit these if necessary.
  2. You must always enter service user authentication in order for the service to run. Use the User Name and Password property to enter service user authentication.
  3. Press the "Execute" button to continue.

FYI You may also configure default service user settings on the main Grooper Config screen. If you enter authentication credentials here, you do not need to enter them when configuring the service. This can save you time when installing and configuring multiple services.

Start the Service

  1. Upon pressing the "Execute" button, a new Grooper Licensing server is added to the list of services.
  2. However, notice its Status is listed as Stopped
    • Also, the icon next to the item is red.

We need to start the service in order for this machine to start hosting license distribution.

  1. Select the service you wish to start.
  2. Press the "Start" button.

  1. Upon successfully starting the service, you will see the Status change to Running
  2. The icon next to the item will also change from red to green.

Now, this machine can use this Grooper Licensing service to hand out licensing information to workstations. We will discuss how to configure workstations to do this in the next tutorial.

Self Hosted Licensing: Licensing Client Workstations

Imagine you have a second workstation from the machine you've already licensed. Opening Grooper Design Studio for the first time on the second workstation, you will see this error message. It's letting you know the product is not yet licensed.

No big deal. That's what the Grooper Licensing service is for! The first machine already running a licensed version of Grooper can create a Grooper Licensing service to hand out licenses to the second workstation (or multiple workstations).

Copy the Connection URL

The first thing you will need is the Connection URL from the Grooper Licensing service.

From the machine running the Grooper Licensing service, open Grooper Config.

  1. Press the "Edit Services..." button.

This will bring up the "Service Manager" window.

  1. Select the running Grooper Licensing service.
  2. Press the "Edit..." button.
    • Note: We won't actually edit the service. We're just doing this to find the Connection URL needed to license the unlicensed workstation.

In this window, copy the Connection URL listed here.

You can close out of this window and Grooper Config at this point.

Open Grooper Design Studio on the Unlicensed Machine

Open Grooper Design Studio on the Unlicensed Machine. This machine will also either need to connect to existing Grooper Repository or have a new one created from Grooper Config at this point.

  1. Press "OK" to continue.

  1. Select the root node of the Grooper Repository's Node Tree.
  2. We will use the License Server URL property to point to the Grooper Licensing service running on the other machine using the Connection URL' we copied earlier.

Point to the License Sever

  1. Select the License Server URL property.
  2. Paste the copied URL from the Grooper Licensing service.
    • Note: You can also simply type in the URL.
  3. Press the "Save" button.

That's it! This machine is licensed now, using the product license distributed by the Grooper License service.

You can verify the product is licensed by navigating to the "Licensing" tab. You can also view specifics about the product license here, as well.

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