Day +894 : Visiting a client – Merlimau Polytechnic, Melaka (1)

I am fine today.

I am visiting Merlimau Polytechnic, Melaka together with a sales engineer today. The polytechnic purchased 10 education licenses of EsteemPlus (v6) software. Though they didn’t have enough budgets to purchase Esteem 7, our latest version of integrated structural software, we are still very happy as we believe, they will upgrade to the latest version sooner or later :-)

The software licenses are controlled through a single hard lock (dongle) that is connected to a networked computer which act as a license manager on the local area network. A maximum of 10 computers that are connected to the same local area network can run the software at once. These computers get the license from the license manager through the network.

For this scheme of licensing model to work, all involved computers must be connected to the network and since our network hard lock is still parallel port based, the computer which acts as the license manager needs to have a parallel port.

When our sales engineer visited the polytechnic last week, he found out that all the computers were without parallel port. And the person in charge there threatened to cancel the order should we not be able to install and demonstrate that our software is working today.

In order to provide solution to the problem, I purchased a PCI –Parallel port card on Friday. We just need to install the card on a free PCI slot in the computer to provide parallel port interface. I did a test and found out that it was working perfectly; the licensing scheme worked well with the hard lock attached to the extended parallel port :-)

Worrying that the sales engineer might not be able to handle the hardware, I offered to visit the polytechnic with him.

When we reached there, we were asked to install the hard lock on a Windows 2008 Standard server. I was afraid that the license manager won’t work on it as it is the latest Microsoft Windows server and we haven’t done any testing on it, so I requested to have the hard lock installed on any lab computer.

The lecturer in charge pointed me to a computer at the back of the lab. I installed the PCI-Parallel card on the computer. But not long after, they said it should be installed on the lecturer computer in front of the lab. So I pulled out the card and re-installed it onto the lecturer computer. And not long after, the IT manager came. He said that all we did was not correct because he had purchased a special computer workstation to be the license manager and this computer will be used by the lecturer. (Fortunately, no one came after this...)

And this computer workstation came with a parallel port! This means all my hard work on Friday – figuring out ways to solve the problem, purchasing, and testing – was wasted. Not only this, I also set up a computer with license manager installed and brought it along to the polytechnic. This is to make sure that if everything failed, we just pluck in this computer and show to them our software works.

To be continued and see you next post :-)