Software products often contain more than a simple collection of on-or-off features. Different customers may have access to different modules, editions, or combinations of capabilities, and enterprise products can require several levels of entitlements within the same product.

Devolens provides flexible entitlement management for defining these structures and assigning them to individual licenses. Features can be organized into modules and hierarchical submodules, allowing licensing models to reflect the structure of the software being licensed.

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Related Resources

• License Automation
• Subscription Licensing
• Documentation on Entitlement Management

Model Complex Product Entitlements

Devolens allows you to define the capabilities that can be assigned to a license rather than limiting products to a fixed set of predefined features.

This makes it possible to represent licensing structures such as:

• Product modules
• Optional features
• Product editions
• Submodules
• Nested capabilities
• Different combinations of entitlements for different customers

The result is a licensing model that can reflect the actual structure of your product.

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Organize Features Into Hierarchies

Some products have capabilities that naturally belong within larger modules.

For example, a product might contain a Reporting module with separate Advanced Reports and Scheduled Reports capabilities. A customer may be entitled to the Reporting module as a whole, or a license may grant access to a specific submodule.

Devolens supports hierarchical feature structures so that these relationships can be represented directly in the licensing model.

This allows applications to check entitlements at different levels of detail depending on how the product is structured.

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Define Customer-Specific Entitlements

Once an entitlement structure has been defined, individual licenses can be assigned the appropriate features and modules.

This allows different customers, plans, or license types to receive different combinations of capabilities without requiring separate products for every possible configuration.

For example, one customer might receive access to the core product and several modules, while another receives the same product with additional enterprise capabilities.

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Support Flexible Licensing Models

Entitlement management can be combined with other Devolens licensing capabilities to create more sophisticated commercial models.

For example, feature entitlements can be used alongside:

• Subscription licensing
• Trial licensing
• Floating licensing
• Offline licensing
• Usage-based licensing

This allows the same product to use different licensing rules depending on the customer and commercial agreement.

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Keep Entitlements Separate From Application Logic

The licensing system determines which capabilities a customer is entitled to use, while the application remains responsible for deciding how those capabilities are presented and enforced.

Applications can check whether a particular feature or module is included in a license and enable the corresponding functionality accordingly.

This separation makes it possible to change a customer's entitlements without requiring a new application build.

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Implementation

The Devolens documentation includes guides and examples for:

• Defining product features and modules
• Creating hierarchical feature structures
• Assigning entitlements to licenses
• Checking feature and module entitlements in applications
• Combining entitlements with different licensing models