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Introduction

Welcome to Sentinel® EMS™. Sentinel EMS is a powerful role-based application designed to manage the business activities required to implement and maintain Sentinel LDK in your organization.

Sentinel EMS streamlines the major work flows in the licensing life cycle of a protected software application, from the moment it is developed, through its packaging, marketing, selling, and order taking, to its distribution and upgrading. Sentinel EMS also enables you to license your SaaS (Software as a Service) applications. You can manage the usage of such applications, disable or enable them when required, generate usage data and reports, and also generate data that is useful for your billing process.

Sentinel LDK separates the software protection process (implemented with Sentinel Licensing API or Sentinel LDK Envelope) from the licensing and production processes (implemented with Sentinel EMS), enabling you to modify your company’s licensing strategy as necessary when circumstances change, and to implement these changes quickly and efficiently.

The primary component of Sentinel EMS is the EMS Web Server. Users in your organization can access the application from client machines in the network using a web browser. Sentinel EMS handles three major work flows: license planning, entitlement generation and production, and software activation. It also provides a centralized license management interface for your customers.

• License planning: Business decision-makers, such as Product or marketing managers in an organization, can define Products, business rules, license terms, and protection levels. The output of the license planning process is a repository of licensed products that are stored in the EMS database—ready for customer orders.
• Production: Staff in your organization’s orders department receive and fulfill orders from customers.
• Software activation and online updates: These are performed by means of EMS when the software is at the end user’s site.

Before you start to use Sentinel EMS in your organization, you may want to prepare a detailed licensing plan for use with Sentinel LDK. This plan could include the licensing requirements for all the protected software applications to be sold by your company and distributed for trial use.

Preparing your licensing plan can include:

• Defining your software licensing strategy
• Analyzing your software products
• Identifying the functional components of these products
• Defining product models and licensing models
• Specifying licensing and protection options

For detailed information on preparing a licensing plan for use with EMS, and on Sentinel LDK concepts, refer to the Licensing section of the Sentinel LDK Software Protection and Licensing Guide.

About This Guide

This guide is designed to help you understand various features of the Sentinel EMS. The guide is divided into the following sections.

• Revision History and Copyright Information
• General Information
• Administration Tasks
• Product Management
• Managing Entitlements
• Managing Product Keys
• Development
• Managing Customers and Channel Partners
• Working with Reports