About GE Licencing
The purpose of the GELS project is to greatly simplify the process of software licensing for GE Energy. The system currently in place is inconvenient for both customers and developers. Customers are required to telephone GE before their installed software is usable, and it GE is required to manually generate activation information to pass on to the customer. The intention of this system was to allow the company direct contact with the end user, in order to gather contact information so that GE may provide continued support to the end user in the future. While this may have been an excellent idea before the advent of the Internet, it is no longer an ideal arrangement. In fact, it may seem obtrusive and inconvenient to the customer. GELS automates the license activation process, while preserving the tradition of gathering end user information.
The main features GELS include automating the process of processing license activations over the Internet. Because customers typically purchase many different software components from GE, their online account also allows them to manage their licenses, renew them, and even purchase new licenses or request evaluation licenses. GELS is predominantly developed using PHP and MySQL, Ajax is also used. Graphs are generated using JpGraph.
The advisors for this project are Mr. Kenneth Ceglia, Senior Project Manager at General Electric, and Dr. Sergiu Dascalu, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Related Resources
Beaird, Jason. “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design”. Ed. Simon Mackie. Victoria, Australia: SitePoint, 2007. 1-32. This is a chapter from a book which is dedicated to designing aesthetically pleasing, user friendly, and accessible web pages.
Goldman, Henrik. "License Activation... for real: Software License Management Blog by X-Formation”. US. 2008. 21 Jul. This article describes a real world implementation of a license activation system that claims to overcome common pitfalls.
Wikimedia Foundation. "Product Activation" Wikipedia. 2008. US. 3 Nov. 2008. This is a Wikipedia article that briefly discusses the topic of product activation.
POETIC. Jan 2009. Open Channel Solutions. Feb 2009. This is a sophisticated commercial software licensing system which GELS is similar to.
