FiveTech Software tech support forums

I'm using Protection PLUS version 4.1 to manage various types of demos, the purchase of unlock codes, and network usage rights. It's very secure and robust.

As mentioned earlier, I put together a file with DLL32 calls to all of the PLUS dll functions. Since then, I've greatly expanded and improved the ProtPlus.prg that I use to implement all this, and so have made it freely available for download below. Of course, to use this you'd first have to buy the Protection PLUS ver. 4.1 package from Softwarekey.com, and then my stuff will enable you to use it with FWH.

However, if you just download my stuff, it includes a demo exe showing the use of several key PLUS functions so you can see how it works before you decide to buy the main package from Softwarekey.com. My package includes a verbose readme.txt explaining it all. My code also has a lot of explanatory comments included, so it should be reasonably easy to use.

Here's the download...

http://www.leadersoft.com/software/ppp4xhb.zip

- Roger

Roger,
I was using PPP in my clipper programs, 15 years ago. It is a very powerful library to protect our programs.
Thank you for this contribution.

Regards,

George

Roger,

For a cheap protection system based on standard USB pendrives, you can review fwh\samples\protect.prg.

It works with standard USB pendrives.

Antonio,

Yes, I've looked at that. It's effective for situations where simple copy protection is the only requirement. However, it appears that for managing the number of allowed concurrent users on a network, and for managing the progressive "turning on" of an app's features depending on what the customer has purchased, that Prot. PLUS may be an appropriate choice.

Here's another example of where P. PLUS seems like the right choice...

We have a computer-based-training (CBT) memory course that consumers can download from the I'net. It contains 21 lessons. The user can take the first lesson for free, and if they like it, they can purchase an unlock code on the I'net for 50 dollars that unlocks the remaining 20 lessons.

We would probably lose a lot of sales if they had to go out to the store and pay an additional 20 dollars to buy a pendrive (if they don't already have one - and most consumers probably don't). Even if they don't mind the cost of buying a pendrive, the sale is killed because they have to do something else (go to the store) before they can make their purchase, and this particular part of our business depends largely on the "impulse" purchase. So in this case, where customer "impulse" is everything, I think the dollar value of the sales we'd lose if we used the pendrive approach would be many times the cost to us for Prot. PLUS.

- Roger