One of the biggest feature requests that I have heard from ISVs, over and over, is the ability to protect their Intellectual Properties (IP). For example, Dynamics CRM ISVs typically implement the custom business logic of their application as a callout managed library(dll) that plugs into CRM execution pipeline. These dlls are part of the ISV solution and should be protected against reverse engineering and illegal copying. Often these solutions are sent to customers for evaluation and after a period, customers may decide not to make a final purchase or stop renewing the ISV license.
The problem is that although ISVs are legally protected by their End-User Licensing Agreement (EULA) against such cases, in practice, most ISVs are not wealthy enough to bring a litigation case against every such customer. So what is the solution? Shouldn't we have a software solution to this problem instead of relying on legal documents?
Here is one possible solution: Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection Services (SLPS). SLPS uses a selective .NET code transformation technology that help ISVs protect their IP with a higher level of protection. There are already some other solutions out there but I highly encourage you to check out SLPs and see how different it is. One caveat is that CRM solutions have more than just dlls. They have xml files that contain customization and client side scripts. What about those non-.NET files? Technically SLPS will not help there a lot and since CRM platform reads and processes these xml files, one place to put a gate would be in the CRM platform itself…..
I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially from the folks who have tried SLPS with Dynamics CRM. Did you manage to get it to work? what was your experience?
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