Planning and licensing

These pages summarise how the licensing of Cardbox works, but if you need any further advice then please contact us or our distributors.

User licences

By a "user licence" we mean the licence that actually lets you sit in front of the computer and open Cardbox.

Single-user licences

If you have a single-user copy of the Home or Professional Edition then you'll normally install it on the computer you're going to use it on.

If you have a computer at home and a computer at work and you want to know if you can use the same single-user copy in both places, see Cardbox at Work and at Home.

If you're on a network then you are able to install the single-user copy on your file server rather than your own computer: this makes the licence accessible from anywhere although of course you're still not allowed to use it in more than one place at the same time. See Sharing Single-User Licences.

Multi-user licences

Multi-user licences are available for the Professional Edition only. A multi-user licence allows a given number of simultaneous users. For instance, if you had a 5-user licence then this would allow up to 5 people to open Cardbox simultaneously: until one of those 5 users closes Cardbox, anyone else trying to get into Cardbox will get a "too many users" error message.

A multi-user licence serves multiple users but the licence itself must be installed only once, in one location. If you want to use Cardbox in multiple locations, see Distributed Systems.

Configuring a multi-user system

LAN-Only Setup: How to set up licensing if you have a corporate network and everyone who might use Cardbox is always on that network.
Adding Laptop Users: How to set up licensing if some of your users have laptops and are only intermittently connected to the network. The exact way that you do this (and the cost) depends on whether you want a laptop user to be able to use Cardbox even when completely disconnected from your network.
Distributed Systems: How to set up licensing if you have offices in various places around the country and want them to share their databases.
First and Second Class Citizens: What to do if some of the users on your network must have guaranteed access to Cardbox; what to do if only certain privileged users should be allowed to create databases on their own computers.