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Using the Dashboard to Manage Licenses

Reference Number: AA-02003 Views: 15308 0 Rating/ Voters

The Dashboard provides an easy and convenient way to manage your LumenVox licenses. From your browser, you can view your currently installed licenses, see which are being used, and also install and update licenses as needed.

LumenVox has provided a number of tools and methods of managing licenses over the years, but since the introduction of the Dashboard utility, this is now the preferred method of managing licenses, since it reduces the possibilities of errors, and is designed to be generally more convenient for users.

If you would like more details about our licensing process, please see our Licensing Overview article.


Different Licensing Types

LumenVox provides a number of different licensing mechanisms, and licensing types. These different types of licensing are often managed in slightly different ways, however the Dashboard is used to unify the methods of managing these via a straight-forward interface.

It is important to note that these different licensing types exist, since they need to be handled slightly differently, depending on what you are wanting to do. The three main types of licenses we will describe here are:

  1. Subscription Licenses
  2. Perpetual Licenses
  3. Flexible Licenses


1. Deprecated - Subscription Licenses

As of the summer of 2016, the Legacy LumenVox Subscription Licensing system was replaced with the significantly improved Flexible Licensing model.

All users of the legacy subscription system were contacted and migrated over to the new system prior to its decommission.

This documentation will be deleted in due course, but will remain available for informational purposes until then. Please refer to the Flexible Licensing documentation instead.


Subscription licenses are managed in the LumenVox cloud. When purchased, you will be provided credentials and information on how to configure your client applications (via client_property.conf) to access these licenses.

From a practical perspective, you will be using one of the LumenVox License Servers based in various physically redundant locations within the cloud. This means that if you are only using subscription based licenses from LumenVox, then you do not need to run your own local License Server, and therefore do not need to perform any maintenance of this local License Server. If you need more licenses, simply arrange that with your LumenVox sales associate, and those licenses will be automatically made available to you with no changes necessary to your configuration.

We have an article on Subscription Licensing which provides more details of this process.


2. Perpetual Licenses

As shown here on this sample licensing page, you can see the number and types of licenses currently installed, as well as their expiration dates. You may need to click on the individual elements of the tree to expand it in order to see the maintenance expiration dates.



License Management Buttons

Along the right side of the screen, you will notice several buttons than can be used to manage your licenses.

Make Server ID File

Clicking on this button will allow you to create an "info.bts" file, which describes the hardware of your machine, which can then be sent to the LumenVox licensing website portal and used when producing new deployments. You can find more information about this process in our Generating a Server ID File article.

Install License

Once you have created a new license deployment (on the LumenVox licensing website), you can use this button to install the license file you downloaded from LumenVox. There are more details about how to do this in our Installing Licenses article.

Uninstall License

This button can be used to permanently uninstall a license from your machine - please note that once uninstalled from a machine, the same license can not be later re-installed. More details on this process are described in our Uninstalling Licenses article.

Renew License

Whenever you update your license maintenance, you need to download an updated copy of the license so that it can be installed on your machine, which will reflect the newly extended maintenance date, and allow use of more up to date versions of LumenVox software.

You can use the Renew License button to renew a license from a newly downloaded file from the LumenVox website.

Go To Website

Clicking this button will open a new browser window and navigate to the LumenVox website.


3. Flexible Licenses

Flexible licenses are very similar in nature to the Perpetual licenses, except the mechanism used has been updated to allow users more flexibility when it comes to installation and reconfiguration of licenses.

When using Flexible licenses, you will need to run a License Server on your site, which can be configured using the Dashboard. Rather than uploading a Server ID File and then downloading and installing individual license deployments, when the License Server is operating in Flexible mode, it will dynamically communicate with LumenVox servers in the cloud to periodically report license, and also gather up-to-date licensing information from LumenVox.

This process was designed to reduce user frustration when working with licenses, since adding new licenses or reconfiguring them can now be done with a simple click of a button, without the need to upload and download files from LumenVox manually.


As you can see from the sample screen shown here, the display of licenses when using Flexible licensing is very similar to that of Persistent licensing.

Note that as of LumenVox version 14.2, an indicator was added below the buttons to show when the last synchronization with the LumenVox Licensing Nodes was successfully performed. This may be useful in confirming whether this connectivity is working as expected. The time shown will be local to the machine.


License Management Buttons

The license management buttons along the right side of the screen also differ slightly from those shown when using Persistent licenses. These buttons are described below.

Resync Info

When operating in Flexible licensing mode, the License Server will periodically communicate with the LumenVox servers in the cloud. No sensitive information is sent to LumenVox when this happens, only a very high level summary of license use is sent, and in return, the License Server will be given up-to-date licensing information, including any changes there may have been (new licenses available, updated maintenance dates, etc.).

This periodic exchange takes place typically between once a day and once a week (configured by LumenVox). This means that you may have to wait until the next exchange before seeing any new changes to licensing. By clicking the "Resync Info" button, you can force this information exchange to take place immediately, so any differences will be seen right away, instead of having to wait. This can be particularly useful when installing new licenses that you want to use immediately.

Go To Website

Clicking this button will open a new browser window and navigate to the LumenVox website.



Proxy Reporting Buttons

Note that the following three buttons are not generally used,  and are only there to support a special Proxy License Server (PLS) mode when using Flexible licenses in situations where Internet connectivity is not possible. Please review our Flexible Licensing Overview article for more details on what this PLS mode is used for, and how these buttons are used in this configuration.

Again, most users will not require these three buttons, since communication with LumenVox cloud servers will be automatically handled...

Create Report File

This button is only used on an Active License Server (ALS) machine to generate a "Report File" which will be sent to LumenVox by a PLS. Please review our Flexible Licensing Overview article to understand what this means.

When you click the "Create Report File" button, a file will be created in the location you select, which should then be moved to the PLS machine to be sent to LumenVox.

Send Report File

This button is only used on a PLS machine and is used to send a "Report File" (created using the "Create Report File" button on an ALS). You will be prompted to select the "Report File", which will then be sent to one of the LumenVox cloud servers. Please review our Flexible Licensing Overview article to understand what this means.

In return for successfully reporting to LumenVox, you will receive a "Sync File" that can be stored to disk, and later imported to the ALS using the Import "Sync File" button.

Import Sync File

This button is only used on an ALS machine and is used to import a "Sync File". A "Sync File" is received by a PLS after sending a "Report File" to LumenVox. Please review our Flexible Licensing Overview article to understand what this means.

Importing this "Sync File" to the secure license server is important, so that the licenses are kept up to date, but also to let the license server know that the previous report was successfully received by LumenVox, which will allow the next report to exclude that usage information.

Important: you must ensure that the ALS is not restarted between the time it generates the "Report File" and the time it receives the "Sync file", otherwise the exchange will not succeed, and with therefore need to be repeated.