3.2. Activation Code Based Licensing

Activation code based licensing activates Sonargraph licenses via Internet or a local license server by requesting a so-called ticket. Every activation code is customer specific and represents a pool of Sonargraph user licenses as purchased and licensed to the specific customer. Activation code based licensing technically requires that Sonargraph has Internet access or that a local license server is reachable. There are two types of activation code based licenses available:

  1. Flexible User License (if you bought Sonargraph before version 9.0 you have flexible user licenses)

  2. Floating License (new with Sonargraph 9.0)

Flexible user licenses support a feature that allows customer-driven transfer of a Sonargraph user license to another user after some amount of time. This works like this:

  • When an activation code based license is requested, Sonargraph automatically requests a license ticket from the hello2morrow license server. This ticket expires after some time, for example after 30 days. During these 30 days, the use of the Sonargraph installation that requested the ticket is licensed (by the user who ran Sonargraph when the license ticket was requested). Sonargraph can be used during this period without any access to the Internet.

  • After the ticket of a Sonargraph installation has expired (in our example scenario, this happens on the 31st day after the ticket has been requested), one of two things typically happen:

    1. The same Sonargraph installation is started again. Sonargraph then notices that the license ticket has expired and lets the user know about it by presenting a dialog to manually request a new ticket from the hello2morrow license server, for the same activation code or a different one if desired. The new ticket again is valid for the same time period. You can toggle the feature at ' HelpRenew License Ticket Automatically ' to have Sonargraph silently perform license ticket requests using the current activation code, without further user interaction.

    2. Alternatively, the user of the installation might not continue to work with Sonargraph; then the license is now, after the expiration of the ticket in the Sonargraph installation, available to some other user. The hello2morrow license server will supply a license ticket to the next user that requests one for the given activation code.

Note that the number of license tickets that can be supplied by the license server for some activation code might be more than one. For example, a company might license Sonargraph for 20 users. The same activation code can be used by all of them, but as soon as the 21st license ticket is requested for this activation code, this request will be denied. A new request for a ticket will only be fulfilled after one of the already supplied tickets has expired, so that at any one moment, at most 20 non-expired license tickets exist for the activation code.

It is not required that the same user requests a replacement of an expired license ticket; any user that knows the activation code can request one of the free tickets. This mechanism reduces the effort needed for license management in a changing user group. However, in order to avoid any misuse we strongly encourage you to restrict the information about your activation code to those persons who are supposed to use Sonargraph.

If you have any suspicion about misuse please inform immediately. We can promptly deactivate an activation code so that any further misuse is stopped and provide a new activation code to you.

Floating licenses bind a ticket to an instance of Sonargraph while it is running. As soon as Sonargraph is terminated the license can be used by another user.

Most of our customers are using our Internet based license server, so there is no need for you to operate your own license server as long as the machines running Sonargraph have access to the Internet. If this is not the case or you want to avoid being dependent on the availability of hello2morrow's web-based license server you can request the usage of a local license server by contacting us via or . Once your request has been approved, you can download hello2morrow's local license server and run it on your premises. If you have a flexible user license it is also possible to run Sonargraph with file based licenses.