dMaintenance and dSupport – Major Functionality Update

In line with my last post about what was on the horizon, I have accomplished that task with dMaintenance and dSupport.

If you didn’t catch it, what I’ve done is give you (through dCloud) the ability to essentially enable/disable remote installations of dMaintenance and dSupport.  This will allow you to sell them to your clients as part of a subscription based service instead of a one-time sale.

For dMaintenance, when you disable the ‘subscription’ you disable the application from executing.  Optionally you can have dMaintenance launch a URL to your website when the app executes, to remind the client that they need to continue their subscription to your service.

For dSupport, you have the same options as dMaintenance, but optionally you can let the application launch but restrict which features that dSupport will do for the client until the subscription is renewed.

Here’s how it works:  You sell the client a subscription to your maintenance package.  Install the program on a client’s system – it will prompt you for a ‘client identifier’ on install.  Use the client’s name, a phone number, customer number from your POS/CRM, whatever.  I like to use client name.  Remember if you are selling this to a business with multiple PCs, use the SAME client identifier for ALL installations.  Client identifier is NOT case sensitive.  During the install, the client identifier is then automatically registered with dCloud as an active subscription.  At any time if you should need to revoke the subscription, you may use dCloudConsole to disable your applications for that client identifier.  Next time that client launches the app (or it is scheduled to run automatically) it can then instead of performing it’s tasks show the customer that their subscription has expired and prompt them for renewal.

Naturally this requires an active dCloud subscription with me, and your dCloud credentials and the appropriate options must be checked off inside your app’s custom configuration, before I create the custom installer for you.  If you have an existing custom installer without these options, just send me your config and I’ll be happy to create a new one for you with the options included.