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MS Office Forum / Word / Programming / September 2006How to distribute a template as a product
Hi All, I've developed a Word template that I want to distribute as a product, something folks buy and pay for :) I have lots of questions. I know that templates are, by definition, to be shared but I want to decrease the possibility of a customer purchasing it and distributing it freely to all of his/her buddies. The Microsoft 'activation' scheme keeps me from giving their software to any Tom, Dick or Harry. Is there some sort of comparable mechanism that a small-time entrepreneur could use? This is probably not the right newsgroup to ask these sorts of questions, any suggestions on where I would post questions about distribution of a template as a commercial endeavor? Karen What's so good about your template that you think people will pay for it.  SignatureHope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP > Hi All, > [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > > Karen Hi Doug, A few years ago I developed an Access DB application for an independent fire investigator. One of the reports for that app was a Photo Log. The client has introduced other investigators to the app and some have been purchased BUT the eye candy that appeals to almost all of the potential customers is the Photo Log. The Photo Log automates the process of inserting photos, captioning those photos, automatically creating the TOC, editing the headers, etc. In a nutshell, using the template, a report which used to take hours to prepare can be prepared in less than 20 minutes. Many of the potential customers for the app have specifically asked if they could just have the Photo Log so..........that's what I've developed and would like to distribute :) Karen What's so good about your template that you think people will pay for it. SignatureHope this helps. Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my services on a paid consulting basis. Doug Robbins - Word MVP > Hi All, > [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > > Karen > Hi All, > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > any suggestions on where I would post questions about distribution of a > template as a commercial endeavor? As I see it your problem is on two levels 1. How do you stop people freely distributing your template as is to their 10 best friends? 2. How do you stop people hacking in to your template, looking at the source code, and modifying it to disable any protection you have in there? No solution to item #1 is worth anything unless you can also solve #2, so let's look at that first. VBA code in a Word template is inherently vulnerable - there are tools about that will remove password protection from VBA projects in no time, no matter how strong the password. Therefore, you will probably have to move at least some of your code out into an ActiveX DLL where the source code is no longer present, and call the DLL from code stubs within your template. Probably the easiest way of doing this is to get a copy of VB6 from somewhere. The language is pretty nearly the same as VBA and the VB6 runtimes are distributed with every version of Office from 2000 onwards, so you won't have much in the way of additional dependencies. That solves problem #2 provided you do it right Then you need to find a way of ensuring that your code will run only on authorised machines, and have that protection code in your DLL, not in your template. There are a number of possible approaches here. There is always the issue of whether the increase in protection is going to be countered by the decrease in usability, so you might find it appropriate to offer it with reduced functionality and no protection, and offer registered users additional features. One way of generating some kind of unique key might be if you get the serial number off the host machine's C drive, have a user provide that when registering, and combine it with a predefined code in some way to generate a machine-specific key. The program won't run unless the correct key is stored somewhere. Karl Peterson has code on his website that allows you to get the serial number of any drive. Take a look at his DrvInfo project here http://vb.mvps.org/samples/descriptions.asp#DrvInfo SignatureRegards Jonathan West - Word MVP www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk Please reply to the newsgroup Keep your VBA code safe, sign the ClassicVB petition www.classicvb.org Hi Jonathan, Thanks very much for the response and the points to ponder :) I do have VB6 but I've never written a dll or a 'stub' for that matter so I'll have to start reading and testing. I will definitely look at the serial number suggestion, that may really help a lot. Again, thanks a lot for helping out :) Karen > Hi All, > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > any suggestions on where I would post questions about distribution of a > template as a commercial endeavor? As I see it your problem is on two levels 1. How do you stop people freely distributing your template as is to their 10 best friends? 2. How do you stop people hacking in to your template, looking at the source code, and modifying it to disable any protection you have in there? No solution to item #1 is worth anything unless you can also solve #2, so let's look at that first. VBA code in a Word template is inherently vulnerable - there are tools about that will remove password protection from VBA projects in no time, no matter how strong the password. Therefore, you will probably have to move at least some of your code out into an ActiveX DLL where the source code is no longer present, and call the DLL from code stubs within your template. Probably the easiest way of doing this is to get a copy of VB6 from somewhere. The language is pretty nearly the same as VBA and the VB6 runtimes are distributed with every version of Office from 2000 onwards, so you won't have much in the way of additional dependencies. That solves problem #2 provided you do it right Then you need to find a way of ensuring that your code will run only on authorised machines, and have that protection code in your DLL, not in your template. There are a number of possible approaches here. There is always the issue of whether the increase in protection is going to be countered by the decrease in usability, so you might find it appropriate to offer it with reduced functionality and no protection, and offer registered users additional features. One way of generating some kind of unique key might be if you get the serial number off the host machine's C drive, have a user provide that when registering, and combine it with a predefined code in some way to generate a machine-specific key. The program won't run unless the correct key is stored somewhere. Karl Peterson has code on his website that allows you to get the serial number of any drive. Take a look at his DrvInfo project here http://vb.mvps.org/samples/descriptions.asp#DrvInfo SignatureRegards Jonathan West - Word MVP www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk Please reply to the newsgroup Keep your VBA code safe, sign the ClassicVB petition www.classicvb.org |
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