NFR Licenses and Internal QA Licenses – Control Without Manual Overhead
Software vendors operate in a wide range of licensing scenarios: direct sales to end customers, distribution through resellers, special licensing for schools and educational institutions, and many more. One use case, however, is shared by nearly every software vendor: providing free licenses to employees, partners, and internal teams.
In addition to commercial licenses for customers and evaluation licenses for prospects, software vendors typically maintain dedicated licensing models for partners and internal testing. These licenses are often referred to as:
- NFR licenses (Not for Resale), typically issued to partners or for internal use at the customer side, for example for demonstrations or integration work, rather than for commercial distribution.
- Internal QA licenses, used by the vendor’s QA teams to verify the proper implementation and behavior of licensing.
If we compare these licenses with evaluation / demo / test / trial licenses, which are usually provided free of charge to prospective customers, there is one major difference: An evaluation license for a customer is typically created once and used once. An internal license, however, should ideally be created once, but used multiple times to reduce the effort required for license creation and management.
While these licenses are not part of revenue generation, they still require a structured and secure management approach. Internal licenses should remain easy to administer while ensuring that access rights, feature availability, and usage conditions remain fully under control.
Several practical and security-related requirements typically come into play:
- Since these licenses are free of charge, the effort required to create and manage them should remain minimal and largely automated.
- If these licenses are lost or shared unintentionally, they should not remain usable indefinitely by unauthorized individuals.
- For demonstration purposes, NFR licenses should typically provide the full feature set, including capabilities introduced in newer product versions.
- Internal QA licenses, intended for testing by the vendor’s QA team, should be short-lived and tailored to specific testing scenarios and feature sets.
In the webinar, you will learn how NFR licenses for partners and customer environments and internal QA licenses for vendor-side testing can be created and managed with CodeMeter License Central and CodeMeter License Portal. The focus is on enabling convenient self-service for employees and partners while still allowing organizations to maintain oversight, enforce policies, and revoke licenses whenever necessary. The full range of CodeMeter container types can be used, including CmCloudContainers, CmActLicenses, and CmDongles.
In addition to item configuration and the creation and management of workflows, you will also see what to consider when implementing these licenses in your software, depending on the processes you choose.
NFR Licenses and Internal QA Licenses – | |||
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| 18 March | 2.00 pm CET | German | Register |
| 18 March | 7.00 pm CET | English | Register |
| I can't attend the live event, but send me the recording when available. | Request | ||
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Webinar Topics
- Requirements for internal licenses
- NFR licenses
- Internal QA licenses
- NFR licenses with a dedicated Product Code
- Concept
- Automatic renewal with CodeMeter License Portal
- License cancellation and revocation
- Implementation with CodeMeter Protection Suite
- Implementation with CodeMeter Core API
- NFR licenses with all Product Codes
- Advantages and disadvantages compared to a single Product Code
- Self-service modifications with CodeMeter License Portal
- Internal QA licenses
- Creation with CodeMeter License Portal
- Repeated use of internal QA licenses
- Summary and best practice recommendations
Join this webinar to discover how a well-designed internal licensing strategy can dramatically reduce administrative effort while preserving full control over feature access, usage duration, and security. Learn practical approaches to automate internal license provisioning, empower employees and partners through self-service, and keep your licensing processes efficient, secure, and fully aligned with your software lifecycle.
For those who join us live and answer a quick survey at the end of the session correctly, there is an additional treat in store: We will draw the winner of a four-hour free CodeMeter consultation from the most brilliant minds in our company. The winner will be notified in the replay announcement.