SIGDEF

Higher Edu - Research dev card
Development from the higher education and research community
  • Creation or important update: 13/09/11
  • Minor correction: 28/09/11
Keywords

SIGDEF : system for the management and distribution of software licenses

This software was developed (or is under development) within the higher education and research community. Its stability can vary (see fields below) and its working state is not guaranteed.
  • System: UNIX-like, Windows
  • Current version: 1.0 - 02/05/2011
  • License(s): GPL, CeCILL - En étude.
  • Status: internal use, under development
  • Support: maintained, no ongoing development
  • Designer(s): IRD - DSI - Service Informatique Scientifique : Stéphane DEBARD (conception), Geoffrey PASCAL (conception et développement)
  • Contact designer(s): stephane.debard@ird.fr
  • Laboratory, service: IRD

 

General software features

SIGDEF is a generic designed application to deliver and manage licences. This tool is intended for IT support services. Two interfaces (one for users and another for administrators) allow to send orders to activate software licenses and to manage them easily.

1 - User Interface:

  • Identification (with a directory, a .htaccess file) or no identification.
  • Choice of the software and its version (management of both individual or grouped orders), choice of the installation of the application(s) following validation instructions.
  • Downloading documents related to usage and access rights (agreements, contracts, letters ...).
  • Summary and acceptance of the users' charter.

2 - Administrator Interface:

  • Control and validation of submitted orders (control of the user information and the user choices).
  • Email license sending after validation, validation may be done ​​by one or several services.
  • Synthesis and search of current orders, committed or sent.

Future work:
- Export raw results of the synthesis of commands.
- Specific requests and crossing data to make assessments on the controls.

The documentation is complete: installation, utilization and assessment, including the design documentation (database, workflow).

Context in which the software is used

Software editors allow software vendors to group the purchasing of licenses for several software packages in order to reduce costs. Companies delegate license management to the IT support services. These licenses are often distributed with the help of ID or activation files provided to the manager without the support of monitoring or management tools.

SIGDEF provide tools for the license management and deployment on a large scale.

SIGDEF is currently used in production (for more than one year) to manage licenses in Geographic Information Systems.
Two independent teams of the same ISD use this application to validate and distribute the licenses to their users (200 users).