NETCFAX - About our Server Licensing

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Its very simple, and the answers to all your licensing questions should be shown below. 

FIRST - The NetCFax clients do NOT NEED to be licensed at all.  All licensing for NetCFax is handled by the fax server alone, and only the fax server needs to be licensed.

IDENTIFYING YOUR VERSION/SERIAL NUMBER
We ALWAYS ask you for the product version and serial number whenever you contact us.
         
This information can be found on the FAX SERVER ONLY of all versions by selecting the "About the Fax Server" option on the Help menu.  
   
If you have a  reasonably current release, this information can be accessed from the the FAX CLIENTS Help menu by selecting the "Check Fax Servers serial # and version" option toward the bottom of the menu, providing the client is logged in to the server.

BACKGROUND
When a NetCFax Server is installed on to any machine, it generates a totally unique serial number that we use to generate your registration code and activation key. 

To protect our licensing system, this automatically generated serial number will always be different no matter which machine you install it on.  This applies if you install it on a different machine or reinstall it on the same machine after reinstalling Windows or adding a new hard disk etc, so please note that your original license registration code and the activation key will no longer be valid.  

If you have to do any of the above for whatever reason, please don't panic, as the new NetCFax installation will give you a 15 day, 25 user trial period anyway, and all you need to do it to contact us within that period by email, telling us what has happened, and providing us with both the original serial number and the new serial number.  The original serial # information is of course available in the registration document we will have sent to you, and you will presumably have saved that information away somewhere safely.  We need BOTH serial numbers if we are to provide you with this free service.

Once we receive this email we will then cancel your previous registration code and issue you with a new one.  This is a TOTALLY free service providing you do not ask us to do this more than 3 times in any 12 month period, which is highly unlikely.

EVALUATION SYSTEMS
If you are evaluating our software, the evaluation installations provide you with a full 15 day evaluation period starting on the date you install it to let try the software out in your own environment. At the end of that period, the server will, quite naturally, cease to run unless you purchase a license for it. Warnings are displayed toward the end of that period.

PLEASE NOTE - IF YOU UNINSTALL AN EVALUATION NETCFAX SERVER AND THEN try to REINSTALL BACK ON THE SAME MACHINE IT WILL NOT WORK, AND WILL NOT EXTEND THE EVALUATION PERIOD.  SUCH ATTEMPTS TO REINSTALL ARE LOGGED AND MAY PERMANENTLY BLOCK ANY FURTHER INSTALLATION OF NETCFAX ON THAT MACHINE, SO WE STRONGLY ADVISE YOU NOT TO TRY TO DO SO.

If you really feel that you have a special reason for needing to test it for a longer period, you need to contact us directly for the relevant permission and information that can allow you to do this.

A question we get asked surprisingly often is whether you are allowed to use the same registration codes to run the fax server more than one machine at either the same time, or even when one system is used as a backup alone.  

The answer to this is a very DEFINITE NO.  

This would of course breach the terms of our license, as each fax server you run on your network must be licensed individually, as they will each have different serial numbers.

You can however install and use as many fax clients as you wish on your network, as we do not limit these, but of course the fax server will only allow connections up to the number it is is licensed for.

We are also often asked how many licenses (we think) you may need, and whether the NetCFax clients also need to be licensed, or how many fax servers you can install on your network, and many other similar questions regarding the way that licensing is handled by NetCFax.

Firstly, it is the NetCFax server alone that handles ALL of the licensing for the entire NetCFax system. The NetCFax client installations do not require any form of licensing, so you can  install a NetCFax client on every one of the machines on your network if  you want to, irrespective of the license count your NetCFax server may support.

NetCFax has no knowledge, and indeed no interest in the Microsoft Windows user accounts, for if we were to use these, it would be possible that we would end up forcing you to purchase more licenses from Microsoft just to run the size of NetCFax server you want to use. You do not therefore have to change your Microsoft operating system licensing at all if you want to use NetCFax  

USER ACCESS ACCOUNTS
                  
What we call a user access account may be more familiar to you as a login account. These are a classic combination of a Login Name (not case sensitive) and a Password (which is case sensitive) that need to be entered into the fields on the login window of any fax client so that it is able to connect to and use the facilities of any accessible NetCFax server.  If that server does not receive login details it recognizes, it will simply refuse access to that client until valid login details are used.  It will also refuse the connection if that login account is in use from another networked PC.

To make it as simple as possible, the NetCFax server licensing system works on the basis of not allowing concurrent use of any of its user access accounts. Therefore no login account may be in use by more than one fax client at the same time.  This means that even if you have say 10 PC's on your network, and you have a NetCFax client installed on each and every one of them, but your server is only licensed for 5 users, only 5 of these client machines will be able to be logged into, and use the fax server at any one time.  Once one of these 5 clients logs off, then of course, another PC could then use that login account.

If you happen to use the special Visitor Login account feature, these also take up a license "slot" while they are in use.

The benefit of this system is that it allows you to use the NetCFax client that may be installed on any networked PC you wish at any time, and as long as user access account is not already in use, you can connect to that NetCFax server and use all of that fax server's facilities.

With the introduction of Roaming Profiles (NetCFax Pro only) the use of an available fax client system on any PC to work from is made even easier.

RECEIVED FAXES

NetCFax does NOT limit the number of faxes that it will receive in any way, but it does limit the number of outgoing faxes for smaller systems as detailed below.

SENDING OUTGOING FAXES (total allowed)
               
THIS LIMITATION IS ONLY IF THE REGISTERED               LICENSE COUNT OF YOUR FAX SERVER IS FOR LESS      THAN 25 USERS...

The maximum number of (outgoing) faxes that any of the smaller NetCFax servers (< 25 users) will process to be sent out on a single day is also controlled by the NetCFax server's licensing system.

The formula used for this maximum value is very easy for you to calculate, as it is simply the 

NetCFax 2.7 and Pro v3.1 only
Server license count * 40.  

As an example, a 5 user 2.7 or 3.1 server will allow it to process and send 200 faxes in any one day, whereas a 20 user server will allow you to process and send 800 faxes in any one day.  

NetCFax PRO+ v3.6 only
Server license count * 50.  

As an example, a 5 user PRO+ server will allow it to process and send 250 faxes in any one day, whereas a 20 user server will allow you to process and send 1000 faxes in any one day.  

Larger systems licensed for 25 or more users ARE NOT LIMITED BY THIS LICENSING SYSTEM AT ALL, AND CAN SEND AS MANY FAXES AS THEY LIKE. Also, this limitation is NOT based on the number of pages any fax may have, but simply the TOTAL number of faxes sent to the server to be scheduled for sending in any single day, irrespective of which login account may send them.

The reason for this secondary licensing limitation (on smaller systems only) is very obvious, and perfectly  reasonable, when you think about it.

In normal use, with fax clients sending faxes one at a time, we believe that allowing each access account to be able to send a maximum of 40 faxes per day is a reasonable number. This is not a per user limitation, but a cumulative total, so even a 10 user server will allow up to 400 faxes each and every day to be processed and sent if asked to do so.

However, the NetCFax client provides very easy access and use of what are called "broadcast" or "fax blast" lists, which may contain hundreds or even thousands of fax recipient numbers and names. 

The use of such lists means that the simple task of creating and sending a single fax, but addressed to the entire contents of that list, and not just to a single recipient, asks the NetCFax server to perform a great deal more work than it would have to perform normally, as the normal usage would require a lot more users to have been sending out faxes that day.

Therefore we believe it is reasonable to expect you to purchase a sufficiently large NetCFax server license that justifies the total number of outgoing faxes  your are asking the NetCFax server to process and send for you.

We recognized that this sort of fax broadcasting could be done quite easily with a very small licensed system, (3 or 5 users).  However, we believe very strongly that using our NetCFax server in that way would certainly be a breach of the spirit, if not the letter of our licensing system. So we introduced this outgoing faxes limit to reinforce our licensing by limiting the number of outgoing faxes you can send to a NetCFax server in any one day (on smaller systems < 25 users only).

The count for this control system is zeroed automatically again immediately after midnight if the server is still running, or on startup if the last totals were dated yesterday.

If any NetCFax server does hit this license limit, it automatically broadcasts a warning to that effect to all of the currently connected Fax Clients, and also does the same when the count is re-zeroed, so that the Fax Clients know immediately when they can start to send faxes to that server again.

MULTIPLE FAX SERVERS
Because NetCFax uses TCP/IP for all of it's communications between the fax clients and the fax server(s), there is nothing at all to stop you installing multiple NetCFax servers on different PC's on your network.  This can prove very useful if you want to divide your faxing system into "departmental" groups, with each having their own personal fax servers and phone lines.  Naturally, each NetCFax server must be licensed separately.

Another huge benefit of using TCP/IP for communications is that the NetCFax client can just as easily connect to a NetCFax  server in another building, another city, or even another country or continent, using a standard Internet connection.  As long as the IP address (or machine name if resolvable) of the machine on which the NetCFax server is running can be accessed from the Internet, the fax client will connect and work with the remote server in an identical manner to when it is used to work across your local network.

Of course, each installed NetCFax server has to be licensed entirely separately for whatever size of system you require it to support.  We do offer a corporate licensing scheme for those organizations that wish to freely install multiple NetCFax servers in multiple locations.   Please contact us directly for more details of this special NetCFax licensing scheme 

The FAX SERVER API/SDK
Because NetCFax provides an "Applications Programmers Interface" that allows you to build powerful fax capability into you own applications, the use of this API is also controlled by a similar maximum count for smaller system when sending faxes out. If you exceed the API counter in any 24 hours period, the API will refuse to respond further until that 24 period has expired.  This limit is also based on the same reasons as discussed above for outgoing faxes. 

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   So, If you want to see what the next generation of 
powerful and yet surprisingly uncomplicated networked 
fax systems really look like, 
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