With the advent of Silicon Office 2001, Silicon Office is now licensed and sold as 3 separate programs. In previous versions there was only a single program.

A reason for this change, is to introduce more flexible and cost effective licence solutions depending on how Silicon Office is used by each organisation, and provide greater security for applications running over the internet.

Follows a description of the new types of licences, and the capability differences of each product licence.

Publisher

The Application Publisher software is required to develop your Silicon Office applications. e.g. Write programs, design screens, format data structures etc..  There is a Publishing utility with the Application Publisher which Publishes your Silicon Office files for use with the Application Browser software.

Browser

The Application Browser can run Published Silicon Office programs, modify data, word processing documents and memory files. You cannot modify programs, design user input screens or structure data files with the Application Browser software.

Summary of Publisher and Browser

In effect, the Application Publisher is a combined developer and server licence. The Application Browser is a client Run Time licence - required on each machine which executes turn key programs.

This new licence structure has been introduced to provide a more cost effective pricing solution for organisations where the majority of users are running previously developed Silicon Office applications.

Generator

The Application Generator software is a direct replacement for the existing Silicon Office program, where each user has the ability to generate programs, design screens, and structure data files, including the ability to execute programs generated with other Application Generator software, either on a standalone machine or local area network. You cannot publish files for use with the Application Browser software using the Application Generator software, however, files generated with the Application Generator, can be read by the Application Publisher - for execution and subsequent Publishing.

Important Notes

If your system sometimes requires that users access the 'command prompt', for users to enter commands and perform manual operations from time to time - you know the ones - illegal maths errors in your programs etc.. You should either make your system more robust before you use the Application Browser (as the command prompt is not available within the Application Browser) or choose the Application Generator software and run as before.

The command prompt is not available within the Browser to provide a more secure, closed environment, especially when running over the internet.   If an error occurs within a program which previously would cause the program to stop and show the command prompt in the Browser, Silicon Office issues a QUIT command to reset and stop program execution after showing the error. It is up to you to either trap the error and provide a suitable recovery operation, either using ;CALLERROR ;ERR or ;ONERROR extensions, or let the error happen and provide the user with a pulldown menu option or button to execute a program, exit system, close all files etc...

Example licence Upgrade Purchase situations

Example 1

Current: 1 Silicon Office for Windows licence used for writting and running programs.

Purchase: Upgrade to Application Generator

Example 2

Current: 5 Silicon Office for Windows licences.  1 used for writing programs and running programs, 4 used for running programs.

Purchase: 1 Application Publisher and 5 Application Browser licences. (Application Browser and Application Publisher can be installed on the same machine).

Example 3

Current: 10 Silicon Office for Windows licences. 2 used for writing/running programs, 8 used for running programs.

Purchase: 1 Application Publisher, 1 Application Generator, 10 Application Browser licences. Note: the programs written with the Application Generator must be published using the Application Publisher before they can be run using the Application Browser licences.

Example 4

Current: 3 Silicon Office for windows. All used for writing programs and running programs.

Purchase: 3 Application Generator licences.