Enhancement to volume license keys
AssigneeMicrosoft Technology Licensing, LLC
InventorsHenry Gabryjelski, Wesley Miller
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method includes issuing a digital certificate to a licensee, the digital certificate identifying a licensed product and the licensee to enable the licensee to enable the licensed product. The method involves receiving a request to enable the licensed product from an entity, the request including the digital certificate and determining whether the entity is the licensee of the licensed product based on the digital certificate. A system includes a relational structure having associations among authorized entities and digital certificates within an organization. Each to digital certificate identifies a licensed product licensed to the organization. A certificate distribution module distributes the digital certificates to associated authorized entities.
Claims13
A method comprising:
- generating a license for a software, wherein the license includes:
- an organizational identifier associated with an organization having a plurality of entities, and
- a parent digital certificate authorizing the organization access to a plurality of functionalities associated with the software;
- generating a composite digital certificate based at least in part on the parent digital certificate, wherein the composite digital certificate includes a portion of the parent digital certificate, at least one child certificate, and a subset of the plurality of functionalities corresponding to the at least one child certificate and is associated with an entity of the plurality of entities;
- receiving a request for accessing at least one, functionality of the subset of the plurality of functionalities from the entity, the request including the composite digital certificate;
- and
- determining whether the entity is authorized to access the at least one functionality of the subset of the plurality of functionalities based on the digital certificate.
A computer program product encoding a computer program for executing on a computer system a computer process, the computer process comprising:
- generating a license for a software, wherein the license includes:
- an organizational identifier associated with an organization having a plurality of entities, and
- a parent digital certificate authorizing the organization access to a plurality of functionalities associated with the software;
- creating a composite digital certificate based at least in part on the parent digital certificate, wherein the composite digital certificate:
- includes a portion of the parent digital certificate, at least one child certificate, and a subset of the plurality of functionalities corresponding to the at least one child certificate, and
- is associated with an entity of the plurality of entities;
- receiving a request for accessing at least one functionality of the subset of the plurality of functionalities from the entity, the request including the composite digital certificate;
- and
- determining whether the entity is authorized to access the at least one functionality of the subset of the plurality of functionalities based on the composite digital certificate.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.