Microsoft® Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services helps you ensure a return on your software development investments. By managing the entire software lifecyclefrom idea to revenuewe enable you to more effectively protect, package, license, activate, and control the use of your software. Its a holistic approach that provides software licensing and protection to meet the challenges of a changing world. The Microsoft SLP Services family of products comprises a set of tools, services and servers designed to help software developers and publishers. Microsoft SLP Services easily allows you to create and license product versions, track product and feature usage, integrate into back-end business processes, and protect your intellectual property (IP).

The new developer toolkit enables protection of .NET code to help prevent piracy and IP theft. In contrast to other solutions, SLP Services provides a vendor-unique Permutation that gives each software vendor their own version of Intermediate Language (IL) helping to prevent the break once, break everywhere challenge. Microsoft SLP Code Protector and a Permutation can also be used to easily map code functions into business features which are defined using Microsoft SLP Server 2008 or Microsoft SLP Online Service. After your application is instrumented in this way, the task of packaging and defining licensing terms for each business feature can be performed by the sales and marketing team, leaving the development team free to move on to the next project. In addition, developers can easily add a secure activation process to their products which provides both anti-piracy protection as well as a communications channel to customers.