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Alteryx Server Discussions

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License Distribution Liability Risk in 2018.x

cstone
5 - Atom

Hello,

 

   While investigating Designer 2018.x I have uncovered a situation, which I believe puts enterprise customers at a financial liability risk. 

Within Designer, when opening the license manager, the license file is presented in its entirety in plain text.  For an enterprise solution, where licenses are bought in large batches, from tens to thousands and even unlimited quantities, should a corporate user decide to share their license key with a friend, and/or publish that key to a community message board such as reddit or somewhere on the deep/dark-web, would this not then cause one of not two scenarios:

    1) All of the license seats on the valid corporate license key be consumed by essentially "internet thieves". 

    2) Put the company who owned the license in a position of financial liability for the distribution of license keys, and open themselves up for legal action and compensation for loss of revenue? 

 

My Question to other corporate IT folks is, do you see this as a potential problem? If not, does your companies legal department see a problem with it?

   I can see no benefits to the end user having visibility to the assigned license key if this is in fact tracked on the License Manager server. 

 

Screen Shot below: *(As a responsible license owner, I have masked my license key, but you are welcome to check your own under Options\Manage Licenses)


Capture1.JPG

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6 REPLIES 6
RoelEsselink
8 - Asteroid

But keys are shared anyway with the user so this could happen regardless of whether it's shown after activation?

cstone
5 - Atom

In our org we have automated the licensing and the keys are not shared. 

RoelEsselink
8 - Asteroid

Gotcha.

cstone
5 - Atom

So, can I ask, how do you know no one from your organization isn't sharing the key/keys outside the company and giving away your license seats? Especially if you are in a larger company dealing with 100+ seat licenses?  

RoelEsselink
8 - Asteroid

We get a weekly license report that shows activations and email address used. We can do a cross check with our internal list of people who requested a license. So far (3 years) I've not seen activations that were unknown to me.

 

I would indeed prefer a licensing system that allows me to designate who can use a license key rather than check after the activation.

cstone
5 - Atom

we used powershell to 1) check a whitelist to see if the user is approved, and 2) mask the keys distributed to the community.