Any chance of dumping the dongle in the future?

[WheresTheDog]

o.k. I know I'm not a current RetailEdge customer, but I've just got to ask because I really, really, really dislike dongles of either the hardware or software variety.

The software variety invariable mess up something major with the OS itself or have major conflicts with other software as it tries to be "hardware".

With the hardware variety, I'm more concerned about if they die, we're out of business until a replacement is received.

Why can't there be some sort of activation code, much like most software makers have gone to? I understand you've got to figure out the problem of how do you prove someone is just doing a re-install on an existing or replacement computer instead of adding a new computer with the same code.

Maybe make it so two or more copies of RetailEdge that are networked together will not function if they have the same code? Also, you could have the code tied to specific information about the company who purchased the software so if someone does "share" their code with a "friend" they have to enter the same company info at their store which would end up printing out on their receipts.

Well, that solves 2 of the 3 problems I can think of. Now what to do with those businesses who have more than 1 store, but only need 1, un-networked register at each store? I think that likelihood is pretty low. I would think if someone has more than 1 store they would want to network the registers together instead of having to enter every item and bit of information over and over.

I don't see why anyone would want to rip you guys off and pirate RetailEdge as your software is quite affordable.

Anyway, just an idea. I don't think the dongle will be something that prevents me from choosing to go with RetailEdge, if that's ultimately what we end up doing, but it will be something in the back of my mind that I'll worry about.

[RetailEdge Moderator]

You have hit on some of the major problems that we wrestled with when implementing the dongle. The main reasons it was implemented this as a hardware key were:

1. Reinstallation Issues. We don't want to have to track this information and make sure that a customer is actually reinstalling a legitimate copy.

2. Flexibility. The way the licensing works is that RetailEdge will run in demo mode unless it finds the dongle. Demo mode simply means that it can't post any more data to the database (sales, inventory, customers, etc). We have many customers who are using more workstation on a network than they are licensed for. So they can simply move the dongle around if they want to post data from another workstation. We also have people who use RetailEdge as a "shadow" store. They take a laptop to a trade show, home, or trunk show and want to run this version. They simply grab a free dongle before they go and put it on the traveling machine.

3. Architecture. There are ways of saying you are touching a file if for instance we were licensing a multi-client workstation license. So when someone logs in, they check against a maximum user count. This is the way QB works and how RetailEdge 7.5 worked. However, in a client server architecture, you are not really touching the data, the data server is. So we can't really use this type of mechanism here.

We used to be worried about dongles going bad. With the old parallel types there were all sorts of conflicts and they were really bad. We have only seen a few of the dongles go bad. One was bad out of the box and so did not cause any downtime. The other was at a beach location and when it came back looked like salt water had been poured on it (salt air). I'm not sure how long their computers last in this environment.

These are some of the reasons we implemented it this way. And most people have not had a problem with it. The few that I am aware of that had a problem with it, did not understand how it worked, were trying to run multiple copies without paying for them, or philosophically did not agree with the dongles.

o.k. I know I'm not a current RetailEdge customer, but I've just got to ask because I really, really, really dislike dongles of either the hardware or software variety.

The software variety invariable mess up something major with the OS itself or have major conflicts with other software as it tries to be "hardware".

With the hardware variety, I'm more concerned about if they die, we're out of business until a replacement is received.

Why can't there be some sort of activation code, much like most software makers have gone to? I understand you've got to figure out the problem of how do you prove someone is just doing a re-install on an existing or replacement computer instead of adding a new computer with the same code.

Maybe make it so two or more copies of RetailEdge that are networked together will not function if they have the same code? Also, you could have the code tied to specific information about the company who purchased the software so if someone does "share" their code with a "friend" they have to enter the same company info at their store which would end up printing out on their receipts.

Well, that solves 2 of the 3 problems I can think of. Now what to do with those businesses who have more than 1 store, but only need 1, un-networked register at each store? I think that likelihood is pretty low. I would think if someone has more than 1 store they would want to network the registers together instead of having to enter every item and bit of information over and over.

I don't see why anyone would want to rip you guys off and pirate RetailEdge as your software is quite affordable.

Anyway, just an idea. I don't think the dongle will be something that prevents me from choosing to go with RetailEdge, if that's ultimately what we end up doing, but it will be something in the back of my mind that I'll worry about.

[WheresTheDog]

These are some of the reasons we implemented it this way. And most people have not had a problem with it. The few that I am aware of that had a problem with it, did not understand how it worked, were trying to run multiple copies without paying for them, or philosophically did not agree with the dongles.

Well, philosophically, I don't agree with dongles . But I do understand how they work. It would sit, securely plugged into the back of the computer under our counter and never get unplugged, touched, kicked, or even getting salt spray from the sea

It does make me feel a bit more comfortable if you've not ran into many problems with them and I don't see complaints about them in the forums (unlike many complaints I have with QBPOS, which you can easily find many, many people complaining about in their forums)

One senario:

In the future when we grow to multiple workstations (and hopefully multiple stores). We'll have machine acting as the RetailEdge server and the clients. What if by chance the dongle for the server goes bad? Can a dongle for a client machine be used as a substitute on the sever machine until a replacement is made?

That begs another question. If the server goes down are the client machines offline until the server is back up? In other words, is there any "offline" work performed at the client?