Dydacomp
In my May 18th post, I wrote a blog piece about how, in many ways, I feel things are definitely looking up at Dydacomp, makers of Multi Channel Order Manager (MOM). Coincidentally, since that time, the MOM Users group, an unofficial forum of often outspoken customers, has been on fire about repeated incidents of getting locked out of the MOM application. Specifically, at login, users were prompted to enter a registration key, without which they could not proceed. And no registration key was at hand to enable their machine.
After several days of user postings, and Dydacomp responses to the postings, the problem became clear. Dydacomp reported that a built-in communication script at each user site is programmed to occasionally fire off a registration signal with a Dydacomp server, which verifies that the registration is valid, and then returns a new, updated registration key. The problem reared it’s ugly head when the Dydacomp server began failing to respond properly, leaving the user in the lurch.
On Monday, May 21st, I did a little digging and talked to the Dydacomp folks to confirm a few things. I was able to confirm that the reg key approach is used to combat software piracy. Although I have been around MOM for more than a dozen years, I was unaware of this approach. However, I think many would agree that software piracy is a front-burner issue for anyone in the software industry. Whether you agree with this approach or not is another matter, but I personally would hesitate to put it into the “terrorist” incident, as it was labeled by at least one user in the forum. Unfortunately for many of us, that is a trigger word that has no meaning in this discussion. Having said that, Dydacomp is now facing what Facebook, Google and others are dealing with daily: that privacy continues to be the #1 issue for businesses in relationships with their customers.
I also confirmed that very soon, Dydacomp will be sending out more information on this issue, in the MOM Users Group forum. Finally, in the next week or two, I will be posting a follow-up piece in this blog, addressing some of the outcomes for both Dydacomp and MOM users. Feel free to let me know your thoughts – good, bad or indifferent.
