Chris - The basic difference between a free Viewer and an activated Desktop Edition is that free Viewers cannot make and save edits to data (there is a ServerPlus-enabled exception for Content View text commentary, but no exceptions for file data).

Spreadsheet solutions allow anyone to change data at the periphery and offer poor support for centralised data governanance, master data management, inheritance or propagation of changes across users. Spreadsheet-based solutions are plagued by a raft of data management and reporting problems known generically as 'data chaos on the desktop', 'spreadmarts' and 'Excel Hell'.

In contrast, Omniscope is designed to work in multi-file chain solutions, each file inherting data sets and transformations from its parents/predecessors according to the overall multi-file architecture being employed. Unlike spreadsheets, Omniscope can support best practices of centralised data management, without resorting to the compexity and opacity of multi-table relational databases or SQL-based datawarehouses.

If changes are required to the local data a file currently being used as a reference file in a free Viewer, the place to make these changes is up-stream, in the parent files, followed by a manual refresh from source in the free Viewer.

Thomas, yes I understand and fully agree with your points about the desirability of controlling data content and architecture and avoiding anarchy.

The motivation behind my request is different from that which you have assumed in your response: Let me give an example to illustrate my point effectively:

I work in three home offices in different countries. My senior staff also often work from their home offices and others work from distributed small office units. (3 staff per unit) at various locations. This setup is a fundamental concept of our business design to achieve cost effectiveness and good work/life balance.

When we meet to work on a specific project or conduct training we need to be able to use one of a number of workstations that have the appropriate software installed and activated. We do not find the use of notebooks/laptops is a satisfactory solution for day to day use for the following reasons:

1. Notebooks are heavy and expensive relative to the same power/ram in a desktop and it is often difficult to connect to two large flat hi-res screens.

2. Notebooks are a data security risk as they can easily be lost or damaged in transit.

3. Notebooks are not good from an occupational health perspective for the back, neck and posture.

So we choose to maintain a significantly more workstations than we have staff. Workstations are not personal they are corporate. Data is all stored on servers or on the cloud via dropbox.

With the current licensing scheme of one license per machine this requires a significant number of redundant licenses to be installed on desktops at the various locations.

So the big benefit to us of having a personal licence key device would be to enable our mobile staff to activate a license on whichever desktop at whichever location they choose or need to work from on a particular day avoiding maintaining a large number of redundant licence keys.

I hope this makes sense.

Chris - This is really a question about our second license keys policy. The more usual case is that although the users' desktop machines already have main keys, some users also want second license keys for portable laptops so that they can modify and configure Omniscope files at home, while travelling and on client premises.

We DO offer deeply-discounted second license keys, but they must be issued exactly aligned with specific corresponding main keys, and are restricted in that once activated they cannot be de-activated by the user, so they cannot be freely moved without our assistance.

Second keys are sold in two ways:
1.) As corporate keys with key insurance, licenses issued in the name of the company owning the corresponding main key and billed/paid by that company.
2.) As personal keys without key insurance, licenses in the name of the individuals and paid by the individuals using credit cards (which they may then re-charge to their company as expenses if appropriate).