Grooper Licensing - 2021
Grooper Licensing is a Grooper Service that distributes licenses to workstations running Grooper applications. Except for stand-alone Grooper installs, a Grooper Licensing service is required for all deployment scenarios.
Grooper can be licensed in two ways:
- stand-alone
- hosted
For "stand-alone" installations, a single license is activated and registered to a local machine.
For "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 and service are 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 "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.
|
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.
- 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")
- 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.
⚠ |
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.
|
Activate the License
|
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
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. |
Installing a Grooper Licensing Service
Open Grooper Config
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. Refer to the Licensing Grooper to an Individual Machine tutorial for more information on how to activate your license. Services are installed and configured in the Grooper Config application.
|
Add a New Service
|
|||
This will bring up a Service Manager window to install, configure and otherwise manage Grooper services.
|
|||
|
|||
|
Start the Service
|
|
We need to start the service in order for this machine to start hosting license distribution.
|
|
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. |
Licensing Grooper from an active Grooper Licensing service
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.
|
|
This will bring up the "Service Manager" window.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
Point to the License Sever
|
|
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. |