Using the Product Packaging Service Operations

Before using FlexNet Operations Web Services, plan how to exchange customer, product, order, and fulfillment information between FlexNet Operations and your other back-office systems. The following table provides a quick overview of how to approach managing your product hierarchy with the Product Packaging Service.

Product Packaging Service Operations

Step

Description

Step 1

Plan how you want to license, package, and support the lifecycle of licenses for your products.

Step 2

Create a license generator configuration for your production VCG or custom license technologies, custom license generator configurations, and custom attributes, if necessary. These entities cannot be created or managed through Web Services.

Step 3

Create license models (and transaction keys, if you are using trusted license models) in the FlexNet Operations UI. These entities cannot be created or managed through Web Services. In additional to deciding how to express your licensing strategy in one or more license models, consider when and by whom you want values for license attributes to be set—that is, by a product manager at the time a license model is created, by an order entry person in your company, by a support person in your company who generates licenses with input provided by customers, or by the customers themselves with the End-User Portal. Also consider policies on license lifecycle operations such as extra activations, returns, and rehosts, especially if your customers will use the End-User Portal.

Step 4

If you use part numbers to identify your products, import part numbers using the Product Packaging Service.

Step 5

Create features and optionally group features into convenient feature bundles.

Step 6

Create maintenance products to represent the value of your support contracts.

Step 7

Create products by adding features and/or feature bundles, linking license models and possibly a transaction key, mapping part numbers, and relating products to maintenance and other products. You may want to use the two getIdentifiers operations to populate look-up tables of the available transaction keys and license model names.

Step 8

Optionally, you can create suites containing groups of products.

Step 9

Create accounts.

Step 10

If you want to test license models and products while you can modify them, you are ready to create test entitlements. Before you can create deployable entitlements that can be fulfilled by customers, you must deploy your license models (only through the UI) and product hierarchy.