Monthly Validation

[Steverino]

We've been having our clients regularly validate their databases: when a certain period expires, the client is prompted to validate, and an encrypted email is created that contains the timestamp of the request, the server IP, and the current expiration, among other information.

They send us the email, and we paste the encrypted string into our Client Management database, which checks their stats against our records.

We then send them another encrypted email back that contains the timestamp, the server IP, and the new expiration, which they paste into a dialogue box to complete validation.

This procedure helps prevent the database from being installed on unauthorized computers (the file will eventually need to be validated), and also prevents people from sharing their encrypted authorization code (if the timestamp doesn't match, it won't validate).

However, sending emails back and forth and copying and pasting into the dialogue box is too much for some of our clients (they don't copy the whole string, they delete the email, etc.).

So...I'm curious if anybody has an idea of how this process could be done automatically without back and forth emails, and without letting the client have direct access to our client database.

Any brilliant ideas? (C'mon, I'm counting on your ingenuity!)

PS. If anybody is interested, I'll post the scripting for what we currently use.