Allowing Offline Phone Activations

If you want end users to be able to activate your product by telephone, you can specify a phone number that end users should call to request an offline activation. The phone number that you specify should be your own organization’s phone number—typically, the phone number for your customer support staff.

The request codes and response codes that are used with phone activations are shorter than the ones that are used with offline email activations; the shorter length of the codes makes it possible to read the codes over the phone. However, short codes are not as secure as the longer codes used with email activations. Therefore, Macrovision recommends that you carefully consider the security risks associated with offline phone activation before offering it as an offline activation method. Use of this option is at your own risk, and Macrovision accepts no responsibility if your company experiences security issues.

Note that offline phone activation requires manual intervention by both the end user and by one of your customer support employees; therefore, phone activation is more costly for you to support than online activation. For more information about offline activations, see Overview of the Activation Process.

Open the Trialware view.

In the Trialware Files explorer, click the file for which you want to enable offline phone activations.

Click the Advanced tab.

For the Offline Activation Phone property, specify one or more phone numbers. Details about the format for this property are provided below.

The phone activation method is presented as an option to the end user only if the end user’s initial attempt to activate by Internet is unsuccessful.

Formatting Guidelines for the Offline Activation Phone Property

The Offline Activation Phone property on the Advanced tab of the Trialware view lets you specify the following:

One or more phone numbers.

One or more locations. For example, if you have offices in North America and Europe, you might want to provide one phone number for customers calling from North America and a different phone number for customers calling from Europe.

Other text strings, such as hours of operation.

Location1, Phone1, Location2, and Phone2 each represent a different text string. You can add as many locations and phone numbers as necessary. Use a pipe (|) to separate each set of locations and phone numbers.

North America (English);1-800-555-1234 (Mon. 12 a.m. - Sat. 12 a.m. US Central)|Europe (English);+44 (0) 555 555 5678 (Mon. 6 a.m. - Sat. 6 p.m. GMT)

Location1 = North America (English)

Phone1 = 1-800-555-1234 (Mon. 12 a.m. - Sat. 12 a.m. US Central)

Location2 = Europe (English)

Phone2 = +44 (0) 555 555 5678 (Mon. 6 a.m. - Sat. 6 p.m. GMT)

If the end user chooses to use activate by phone, the trialware run-time dialog will have a drop-down list with the following options:

If the end user selects the North America option, the following text is displayed in the trialware run-time dialog:

North America (English): 1-800-555-1234 (Mon. 12 a.m. - Sat. 12 a.m. US Central)

If the end user selects the Europe option, the following text is displayed in the trialware run-time dialog: