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Licensing

Each installation of Vinyl must be licensed. If Vinyl is unlicensed: users will be denied access to Vinyl applications; administrators will be able to access only the Vinyl Licensing application.

The license status is displayed in the page footer. Administrators will see a warning if the license expires within 30 days. After the license has expired, Administrators will see a message indicating that the system is unlicensed. Users do not see these messages.

Note

For the purposes of licensing, an "Administrator" is any user granted privilege to the Vinyl Licensing application. On a default install, only members of the Administrators group are granted privilege to the Vinyl Licensing application.

License

A Vinyl license takes the form of a physical file, typically ending in a .lic extension. A license includes the following information:

  • Licensee - The name of the organization to which Vinyl is licensed.
  • Issued At - The date and time (in UTC) at which the license was issued.
  • Expires - The date and time (in UTC) at which the license expires.
  • Development - Boolean value indicating if Vinyl license is approved for usage in Development environments. Note: Development value is set by the license key and cannot be modified by a User.

Installing a License

Licenses can be installed into Vinyl using one of two mechanisms:

  1. User interface
  2. File system

Installing a License via the User Interface

Typically, administrators will install a license using the Vinyl user interface.

To install a license via the user interface:

  1. Log into Vinyl as an administrator
  2. Navigate to the IDE > Additional Settings

  3. Click the Licensing button

    If Vinyl is currently unlicensed (such as on a default install), the Licensing application is the default application.

  4. Click the Upload button

  5. Browse to select the license file
  6. Click the Save button
  7. Verify the license information is correct
  8. Click the Activate button
  9. Click the Launch button

Installing a license via the file system

To install a license via the file system:

  1. Log into the web server on which Vinyl is installed
  2. Launch Windows explorer
  3. Locate the Vinyl installation directory (e.g. C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Vinyl*)
  4. Copy the license file to the App_Data directory
  5. Rename the file to vinyl.lic (if it is otherwise named)

Vinyl will automatically detect and install the license.

Important

There are restrictions when installing a license form the file system:

  • Vinyl will only install the license from the file system if Vinyl does not currently have an active license. For this reason, this approach is typically only useful on a default install: it can't be used to replace the license on a previously licensed system.
  • Vinyl will only install the license if it is valid and hasn't been previously activated. This ensures that Vinyl will not attempt to install an expired or otherwise invalid license.

License Term

All licenses are valid for a term which starts on the date that the license was issued and ends on the expiration date. License terms may not exceed 2 years.

30 days prior to the end of the license term, Vinyl will display a warning message in the page footer. This message is only visible to administrators. Specifically, it's visible to those users that have access to the Vinyl Licensing application.

The license term includes a grace period. Vinyl will continue to function for 30 days after the term has lapsed.

Deactivating a License

Warning

Deactivating a license will render Vinyl inoperable.

To deactivate a license:

  1. Log into Vinyl as an administrator
  2. Navigate to IDE > Additional Settings
  3. Click the Licensing button
  4. Click the Deactivate button
  5. Click the Proceed button to confirm