A New Year, A New Customer Support Portal! 
Dear Friends,
Looking back, 2007 was an exciting year at Macrovision®. We listened to our customers and continued to add new functionality and support to our FLEXnet® products based on your feedback and needs. We also added new training classes for both FLEXnet Publisher and FLEXnet Operations to help you get the most value from our products.
And last, but certainly not least, we started providing customers with this quarterly newsletter to keep you up to date on everything going on in the world of FLEXnet.
So, now that 2008 has arrived, we decided to start the New Year with a bang. As director of customer support at Macrovision, providing you with first-class customer support is my top priority. Thats why I am truly excited to announce that on January 14, 2008, we deployed a brand new customer support portal to better serve your support needs.
This new portal is designed to provide you with superior customer support by improving your experience when submitting support tickets, searching our expanded knowledge base, and looking for Macrovision product documentation.
We listened to what our customers were saying they wanted from a support portal and added new functionality to meet those needs. This includes:
- Personalized Site: Each major Macrovision product line has its own content site. You can also save searches and keep a list of your favorite documents for later reference.
- Intelligent Search: Search our knowledge base, documentation, and communities for answers to your questions. In addition, the new portal provides you with the ability to filter and focus search results like never before.
- Documentation Center: Find and view product documentation in our easy-to-navigate Documentation Center.
- Support Incident Management: Create, update, and view your support incidents.
- Profile Management: Manage your account information and view your company’s order history, product registrations, and support contracts.
Macrovision customers can view the new support portal at http://support.macrovision.com/. Please check it out and let us know what you think. As always, we rely on your feedback to continue to improve the way we serve you.
And here’s to a great 2008!
Sincerely,
Andy McGovern
Director, Technical Support
Macrovision
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New Product Release: FLEXnet Operations 11.5 
On December 21, 2007, Macrovision announced the general availability of FLEXnet® Operations 11.5. This major release addresses many key enhancements for end-to-end license activation , custom attribute infrastructure, entitlement ownership tracking, and enhanced support for certificate licensing (including the ability to perform bulk rehosts).
With this new product release, FLEXnet Operations and FLEXnet Publisher are now synchronized releases with the following shared enhancements:
- New XML (long code) and short code requests that include UNM values, reason for activation or return, and platform information (in the long code)
- Vendor-defined data in the responses
Other FLEXnet Operations enhancements include:
- Customer Data Collection: Software and hardware producers will be able to better understand their customers (even those that purchased through resellers) by gathering end-user demographic data during the activation and registration process and delivering responses to customers based on that data.
- Disconnected Usage Enhancements: Producers are now able to collect and send data from/to the customer during the activation process even when customers are disconnected.
- Enhanced Data Mining: Software and hardware producers can now gather detailed data around activations, so they can use this information to troubleshoot customer issues.
- Enhanced Fulfillment History Data: Producers can now better understand customer activity by gathering data on the reason for a license’s return, repair, and more.
- Custom Attribute Searching: ISVs and hardware vendors can leverage FLEXnet Operations to track and search for attributes they define including customer demographic and product-specific data – for both FLEXnet and other (commercial or homegrown) licensing technologies.
Learn more about this latest release.
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Maintenance Release: FLEXnet Publisher 11.5
The FLEXnet Publisher 11.5 maintenance release was made generally available on December 17, 2007. The 11.5 release addresses many key certificate and activation-based licensing issues. Also, this release has support for two additional platforms for Redhat Enterprise 5.0 and SuSE Enterprise 10.
FLEXnet Publisher 11.5 builds on its core value proposition by providing you with the ability to:
- Increase product revenues through flexible product bundling and configuration
- Recapture potential revenues lost to piracy and unlicensed use
- Package software flexibly to meet market demand
- Creatively price for broader market and deeper account penetration
- Rapidly tailor product licensing and packaging terms to new customer segments
- Electronically address enterprise software compliance
Learn more about this latest release.
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Webinar: Capitalize on Revenue Opportunities with Simplified Entitlement Management
Join Macrovision on Tuesday, February 26th for a live Web seminar detailing how you can solve your software licensing and distribution issues with simplified license management using FLEXnet Operations. Macrovision will also be giving away an Apple iPod touch to one of the attendees!
Webinar Details
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
11:00AM PT/2:00PM ET/7:00PM GMT
Register now
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Note on FLEXnet Manager
A quick note on FLEXnet Manager: version 11.0.0.3 was released on December 21, 2007. Several bug fixes were resolved, which had been reported by our customers. All FLEXnet Manager customers were notified on December 21 2007 of the product’s availability and were invited to come and download the latest binaries.
Learn more about FLEXnet Manager.
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Customer Case Study: Pitney Bowes MapInfo
For over 20 years, Pitney Bowes MapInfo (MapInfo) has been providing location intelligence products to organizations around the world.
Recently the team of MapInfo licensing professionals embarked on a mission to globally transform the company’s software licensing strategy. At the time, licensing for their many software products was done in a very limited fashion; not done universally for any one product. Certificate-based licensing was only present in certain releases of certain products in certain parts of the globe, and there was no ability to track those licenses other than with the manually driven homegrown system that was also used randomly.
The MapInfo team selected Macrovision as its licensing vendor of choice. They chose two solutions from Macrovision: FLEXnet Publisher would be used as their general licensing technology and FLEXnet Operations would automate license generation and entitlements and integrate with their back-end financial systems for reporting, tracking, and analysis purposes.
Using FLEXnet Publisher and FLEXnet Operations, MapInfo has added universal licensing capabilities to its flagship product, MapInfo Professional, enabling automated licensing and customer-powered activation.
Business benefits include:
- Improved day-to-day licensing operations
- Remote operations are now managed with one tracking system
- More accurate data for tracking and analysis of how MapInfo Professional is being used around the world
- Customers have gained independence to choose how and when they deploy MapInfo Professional
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White Paper: Back-Office Requirements for Electronic Software Licensing
When a software or hardware vendor takes advantage of software licensing to restrict unauthorized use of their product and enable more flexible licensing policies, a system needs to be in place to handle the license generation infrastructure.
The systems that comprise a standard back office, such as financial, order entry and customer management are generally understood for most industries. This is not true for an electronic licensing back office. Due to the diverse requirements in an electronic licensing back office, no common standards have been established to operate such a system.
This white paper explores the needs you should consider for your electronic licensing back office. Download it now!
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Revisiting SoftSummit 2007 Stay Ahead of the Curve
SoftSummit 2007 brought together approximately 350 of the industry’s software producers and enterprise IT professionals to acquire knowledge about Best Practices for Software Producers, Enterprise Software Asset Management, and ways to simplify relationships with customers.
Consistent with previous years, the Birds of the Feather sessions were one of the more popular tracks, with attendee feedback being very positive for this session. Overall, the survey feedback from the event has been extremely positive and attendees felt the information and value they received was meaningful. Consistent with previous years, attendees felt the networking opportunities are one of the key components of the program. Some of the popular presentations were:
- CELUG Licensing Challenges
- Is Licensing Complexity Driving Away Your Customers and Overloading Your Infrastructure?
- Licensing in a Virtualized Environment: Realities & Solutions
- Best Practices: Keys to Negotiating Great Contracts with Software Producers
Sponsor participation was strong again this year and included Arxan, Scalable Software, AppStream, Citrix, NPD Group, Thinstall, FileWave, Ryma, Platform, and WIBU Systems. Thank you to the sponsors for their continued support!
We look forward to bringing you another exciting program next year. Watch for more details.
The SoftSummit presentations are now available on the softsummit.com Web site and can be downloaded for your enjoyment.
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March Training Classes: FLEXnet Publisher and FLEXnet Operations
Become a licensing and entitlement expert and get the most out of your FLEXnet products with Macrovision training classes. Four new March classes are now open for registration. Click on the class name below to learn more.
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