Technical Framework
The FLEXnet Connect Framework is a pull-based architecture consisting of the following main components:
Framework Diagram
FLEXnet Connect Agent
The FLEXnet Connect Agent can either be deployed along with your application or separately as apart of your customers' IT infrastructure. For your customers’ IT administrators choosing to distribute updates with FLEXnet Connect, the Agent handles all the communication between your application and the IT administrator’s Notification Server, notifying your application of available updates and optionally downloading and installing them.
Additionally, if your enterprise customers use their own software distribution system (such as SMS, ZENworks, LANDesk, Tivoli, or Marimba), the IT administrator can choose an Agent-less model where the FLEXnet Connect Agent is not deployed on the end user’s desktop. In this scenario, the IT administrator can download, stage, test, and approve updates, then configure them to be deployed with their existing deployment infrastructure.
Notification Server
The Notification Server is a Web application server. When the "Check for Updates" option is selected in your application, the Notification Server is the server that is accessed to receive information on any updates that are available.
Database
The database component serves as the back end of FLEXnet Connect. This database stores information on which updates are currently available for your different product and versions. The data is entered into the database via the Publisher Management Point.
Publisher Management Point
The Publisher Management Point is a Web-based tool that allows you to publish your updates. This site contains a list of all your software products and versions, and is used to publish updates for any of these products. When you want to publish an update, you walk though a series of forms that prompts you for information about the update, the location of the update files, and which product(s) and version(s) should receive the update. Once published, the update is immediately available. This site is not accessible to end users.
Customer Management Point
FLEXnet Connect provides your customers' IT administrators with a Web portal for managing all your updates. The portal gives IT administrators the ability to synchronize with your update server to check for new updates. It lets them decide if they want to receive just your update metadata to review or both the metadata and the update files. They can also choose to bypass any review and testing and simply auto-publish your updates out to their organization. Plus, they can schedule when and how often they want to check your server for new updates.
If IT administrators use FLEXnet Connect to roll out the update, the Customer Management Point will walk them through a series of simple steps to ensure the update is targeted properly. And once the updates are deployed, IT administrators can see at a glance which systems have installed any given update. You can also customize the portal to provide any additional reporting data your customers need.
