Accordance on a Network?

[Helen Brown]

We have received several inquiries about the feasibility of running Accordance over a network and allowing multiple users to access the program and the contents.

 

We are not sure whether any of our users are currently doing this. If you are, or know of someone who is, please let us know.

[Gary Succaw]

Would running Accordance on a network be a violation of its EULA?

[Ken Han]

Wouldn't this put Accordance at the mercy of circumstances Accordance can't control such as network latency/availability/correct end user config? It would also take away one of Accordance's key selling points of instantaneous search results. I think a better way might be to offer institutional license that covers all their current students at a reasonable price. And since, presumably, what the institutions pay in licensing fee will, at least in part, come from student tuition, offer the graduates a reasonable way to convert their institutional license to personal license after graduation. Now with Accordance on PC also, this might serve to create a growing body of Accordance users who have investments in the platform.

 

With that said, I think one advantage of network access might be the ease of sharing some custom tools. What if Accordance made it really easy for professors to distribute their class syllabi, lecture notes, syntax diagrams, timeline, custom map layers, etc.? Imagine a church history / historical theology dept requiring all students to use the timeline, for example. That would be super.

[Scott Knapp]

There really is no easy way to support this since the structure of the application is not set up to be a client-server type which is really what this request is about IMO.

 

There is the license server approach which might work better with the current codebase. A centralized license server that controls how many simultaneous instances of the application can be running on the local network at the same time. You could further take that to also include individual license "seats" for the modules themselves. This is a very common approach in higher end technical software that might be able to also work here.

Edited August 3, 2013 by Scott Knapp

[Helen Brown]

Thanks, Scott. I don't think there is a fundamental problem with the EULA since we would license for the allowed number of simultaneous users. I don't see how it could be affordable for a school to license that complete installation for all students.

[Scott Knapp]

That's why you would end up licensing a fixed number of simultaneous "seats" to the running the application. You could also have separate module bundle seats or individual module seats. It can get complicated but from the application point of view its rather simple to check in with the license server when attempting to run the application or open a particular module.

 

The work is in creating the license server itself. Fortunately there are many, many commercial version available that run on all sorts of platforms.