Registration Codes

[aschechtman]

Two requests for making registration codes easier to manage for publishers.

1) Allow for a bypass registration code. As a publisher of many different docs each with their own registration code sets, whenever working with or testing these documents I need to open up a list of the corresponding registration codes and enter it. It would be great if on the iSiloX Security tab one could enter a bypass password or serial number that one could use with several documents so, in addition to all the generated serial numbers, one could access the document using the bypass serial number. It would be very convenient. Of course, one would need to carefully guard that password.

2) Allow one to designate the first four characters of the registration code. Currently, all the reg codes are random. If one could designate the first few characters of the code, it would be easier to tell which codes went with which documents. For a document on space travel, all the reg codes would be SPCE-635R-TUSQ-87HY, SPCE-2398-IY61-N08L, etc. while a document on cars could be CARS-8JTY-OP93-QW34, etc. This would also be a nice added convenience.

Andrew

[iSilo]

For your #2 request, if you could specify a prefix that could be entered by the user but be ignored in the validation process, would that help? In other words, keep the current 16 character format, but allow you to add any number of characters before the registration code when you provide it to the user? Essentially iSilo would be modified to only pay attention to the last 16 alphanumeric characters. This way if you had users using older versions of iSilo, you would just instruct them to use the last 16 characters, while users using newer versions have the option of either entering the entire registration code (e.g., along with your custom prefix) or just entering the last 16 characters.

As an example, let's say the registration code generated by iSiloX is ABCD-1234-EFGH-5678. If the idea suggested above was implemented, you would be able to provide a customer with SPACE-ABCD-1234-EFGH-5678 or CAR-ABCD-1234-EFGH-5678 or Z-ABCD-1234-EFGH-5678 and so on.

[aschechtman]

I didn't think about backwards compatibility. I imagine that would make it difficult to just change the first four characters of the 16. I think having the option to add a leading prefix that wasn't processed would be useful. As a publisher, even if I just added a single character in front of the processed 16 characters it would easily allow me to know which reg codes go with which products. This would be very handy especially when doing customer support for a person with several documents each with different reg codes. I could tell them "Use the reg code that starts with A for document A and the reg code that starts with B for product B."

Andrew

[aschechtman]

Nice to see this feature added in iSilo 4.3 beta1 ("Added ability to accept prefixes in document registration codes").

Will this be backwards compatible? For instance, if I issue a registration code with a 4 character prefix, will versions pre-4.3 see this as an invalid reg code?

I'm looking forward to taking advantage of this feature. Thanks for adding it.

Andrew

[iSilo]

Note that you should not issue registration codes with prefixes until after version 4.3 is released. Also, it is probably best to wait a couple of months or more until after the release of version 4.3 before you start issuing registration codes with prefixes to give version 4.3 some time to percolate out to users as users usually do not always immediately install the latest version.

The format of document registration codes has not changed, so if you add a prefix, you need to let users know that if they are using a version of iSilo prior to version 4.3 that they should not enter the prefix. To clarify, the change in version 4.3 of iSilo is that it will accept the prefix and ignore it in validating the registration codes. Previous version of iSilo will see the prefix with the registration code as being an invalid registration code.

[aschechtman]

Thanks for the clarification. I think many of my users don't update to the most current version of the iSilo reader until there's a "must-have" feature they need for a particular iSilo document. Recent "must-have" features for my users have been compressed images and, more recently, external document linking. I'll probably need to wait until the next "must-have" feature to get all my users to update to a version of iSilo that will then allow the use of the reg code prefix feature.

Andrew