[Phpwm] Installer / Licence key check for application

[Ian Munday]

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone have any experience with wrapping  
applications up in an installer and validating against a unique  
licence key?

A client wants to make the sale of his application (I believe Flash /  
Excel based - don't ask) available via a website.  Ideally I don't  
want to touch the software that he has written in anyway, rather just  
wrap the whole thing up in an installer package which also contains  
the licence key check.  It will be delivered to a Windows-only  
audience at the moment.  The licence key would be 'purchased' via the  
website.  I'm comfortable with building the web interface for  
downloading the packaged application and purchasing / generating a  
licence key; I'm less so with the application installer / licence key  
issues.

A colleague used Wise Installer in the past for packaging an Access- 
based piece of software, but licence key validation was built into  
the application itself and we can't recall whether Wise could bolt on  
licence key validation.  Does anyone know of any products that do this?

I did wonder if the download could simply be made available via a  
time-limited URL rather than using licences at all.  It seems logical  
that licences only work as intend if some how the application can  
request 'activation' against a centralised system aware of all  
downloads and installations, otherwise, people just share the licence  
key with the software.  But then this relies on implementing putting  
Internet / telephone activation infrastructure in place too.

I'd welcome hearing your experiences / views!

Ian


----
Ian Munday
Illumen Ltd.
www.illumen.co.uk

Tel:  0121 703 3111  /  0845 00 999 00
Email:  ian.munday at illumen.co.uk
Skype:  ian.munday