Xheo Licensing

chrisw

New member
Joined
Jul 13, 2004
Messages
1
Programming Experience
3-5
I just read the review of Xheo Licensing and Desaware Licensing in the Announcements forum. Actually, I'm not sure you could call it a review of Xheo as much as a slam, but whatever.

I'm a registered user of Xheo, and have used it to protect my (shipping) application since the Xheo V 1.x days. Other than that, I have no relation with Xheo or Paul whatsoever.

The article seemed to take Xheo more to task for it's perceived support weaknesses, rather than those with the licensing app itself. From my perspective, I can't see how the authors of this post could be more wrong. I've exchanged email with Paul on at least 6 occaisions, sometimes about bugs in his code, sometimes about dumb errors in mine. He's never been anything but extremely helpful and polite. The response time has always been incredibly fast, even during "off" hours. I can't but wonder how the authors of this piece could have received the response they report.

As far as the product itself; it's great. I currently use one of the default licensing templates, but I'm just about to create my own. The software is so comprehensive and customizable that you can do just about anything you want. I've deployed it in enterprise customer sites with my product (really, really large ones) and I've never had any issue with the product. It's that good.

Lastly, I looked at the Desaware product when I went to choose a licensing tool. It looked like a good product, but it was just shipping the 1.0 version. Xheo seemed more mature; more polished. I'm a registered owner of other Desaware products, so I *like* the company. But I just thought Xheo was the best of breed in licensing. Also, I have to admit the pricing was a factor. Desaware costs $1495. Xheo is much less, no matter what version you buy. You can even get Xheo source. So Desaware may be great, but at $1495 it is the most expensive tool I ever looked at, exceeding even things like Install$hield and Robohelp.

So, that's my view. As always, you should take a look at the tools and decide for yourself.

Chris
Sirana Software
 
Generally if a company is too afraid to tell me what their product costs up front then it is "too much"! X Formation might be great but the page just isn't good enough for me to spend my time trying to get a price from them.....
 
This is very common though. You have lots of other companies (like www.star-force.com, www.macrovision.com, www.safenet-inc.com and lots others) who don't reveal prices. Typically the price would depend on your needs (e.g. it's a configurable package which may contain more then you need). Obviously these products are not interesting to you, but they could be to others.

Besides in larger companies the price is just one factor. Fast support and features and custom extensions etc is often important too.
 
But more often than not, if the publisher doesn't print prices it really is "too much" for me. That's just me, though, and everyone's mileage will vary!
 
Back on topic

To get back on the topic of this post...

The original technical portion of the Xheo review was completely innacurate. However I feel that this would have presented itself if the review wasn't cut short.

Additionally, people's experiences with support ALWAYS vary. I have almost always experienced extremely helpful support and faster than normal responses. Unfortunately my most recent support request wasn't answered in it's normal helpful fashion, until I asked if upgraded to the source code version would aid me in my solution. This goes to prove, that support experiences will always vary. (Paul is clearly an extremely bright individual, and as most brilliant people are, they typically take criticism hard)

Now back to the technical portion. Xheo has much more flexibility than Desaware. Out of the box Xheo is an extremely robust licensing engine. The documentation is lacking, so it is geared to the novice user or the expert users. The intermediate users will end up contacting tech support quite often.

The base of the licensing engine is hash codes off of the hardware. If I remember correctly, you can even pick which hardware the hash is generated from. You can additionally add in custom "limits" to enhance your licensing scenario.

My feeling has been that Xheo will refuse to reallocate a purchased Xheo license. I can understand their probable reasons, some of which probably deals with having to look up your license in the server database and resetting it. You then have two solutions, buying an extra seat for a paultry couple hundred dollars, or doing something that I have been doing. Please note this is not recommended, but I don't think it violates the EULA (I even contact them about using it on VPCs, and they seemed ok with it). Basically install Xheo on a Virtual PC (VMWare or MS's) and use your Serial #, but do not Activate it. When the activation limit has been reached, roll your VPC back and reinstall it.

Overall, I found that Xheo was easier to use, more robust, and much cheaper than Desaware's product. Note that you can buy the source code and additional licenses for the cost of Desaware. The biggest sell for me was that in less than a couple hours I had a Beta product ready with Xheo but it took me hours just trying to figure out how I wanted to implement Desaware's tool.

I've done some pretty great stuff with Xheo and just recently purchased the source code so I could customize the proxy server code.
 
I'll join a few others on this thread who are chiming in on behalf of Xheo.

The review was woefully unbalanced and unfair. It's ok to slam people, but there is a proper way to do it by using checks and balances along the way. For example, a respectable newspaper would have gone about it differently while being no less thorough.

Here's an anecdotal point: We have been using Xheo for (our commericial products) over a year and have no major problems with the functionality or the support.

Now that we're releasing a new consumer product I re-evaluated the .NET solutions out there to decide if we should stick with Xheo or switch to something better. After doing a fair amount of googling and evaluating other products, we've decided to use it for our consumer products also.

Also contrary to another post in this thread I checked with Xheo and verified that you will not be charged to reactivate if you reformat or change development systems as I know many developers do for whatever reason.

Xheo is not perfect, but we've decided it's the best solution out there for our products on the high end and the low end after quite a bit of research.

Full disclosure: Niether myself nor anyone at our company is associated with Xheo. I'm not the one who has been using it a year inside our company, which is why I was open to switching when the time changed. I don't know Paul personally and never even knew Xheo had a Paul until the last week.

You can ask me again after I've lived with it in our consumer product for a while for a long term view, but as of now it's an easy choice.

Regards,
L. Whitney
www.trevoli.com
 
Xheo a one guy company?

First of all I have to say that both Xheo|Licensing and Codeveil are great products. I've been a client for a year right know but my biggest complaint is the activation issue with the products, I'm a freelance developer and I have custom made development environment before I changing the my old OS to the new x64 platform I asked Xheo=Paul if I could reactivate both products smoothly I he said YES. When I tried to reactivated the products I got nothing and Paul=Xheo stated that I need to buy another license ($899 Codeveil, $390 Xheo|License) I told him to kindly remove the current activation record from the system I he refused. So Know I waste $1300 on two products I can't use.
If anyone has this kind of issue I would appreciate any help since I'm researching the possibility of make legal steps against xheo=paul whatever

Is not fair that this one guy company treats customers like they where pirates or anything else
 
agree

I am same experiences as gvilas. Product is rather nice, but their activation scheme is really the problem. If your configuration changes and you run out of your reactivations they refuse to reactivate it. :mad:
 
A company that doesn't trust their customer is one in which doesn't deserve to exist. I could not recommend stronger against Xheo licensing, avoid it like the plague! I've been using Desaware licensing for years, it is a fantastic and extremely capable product masterfully designed by Dan Appleman and his crew of Desaware. They fully trust their customer, I had computer issues, server issues, all of which they accommodated to with no hesitation. My limited experience with Paul and Xheo was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck that this was one product I was NOT to entrust with my software.

Click here to learn more about a top notch product activation system to protect your .NET products!
 
xheo activation

We had this activation issue with paul=xheo as well, he refused to reactivate our license.

Activation schema is very poor, if you have a laptop even without adding / removing any hw into your computer it may require activation. Especially if you move between multiple docking stations.

On top of that, we bought permanent license (or actually two of them) and later found out that they are LEASED licenses which require reactivation every few days. So if you are out of the network and hit this situation, not possible to use the product at all!

But, for all those out there without any support from paul=xheo, if your xheo product requires activation, just turn the startup time to now() (VERY simple registry tweak...) and you can continue to use the product without activating it, even if the trial period has ended! You are anyhow entitled to this since you have bought the license!

For a good guy, takes 15 minutes to figure out how to do this... if not, contact me...
 
Back
Top