Steelbox License Portal
When I started working at Steelbox, hardware shipments were sporadic. Whenever a new shipment was about to go out, someone from QA would travel up to the manufacturing facility and qualify and license the hardware. This licensing info was kept in a spreadsheet on a network drive at the office. As we grew and needed the manufacturing process to be more independent, however, we realized that this system was not reliable and would not scale. We needed a way to expose the licensing process to our manufacturer and to track what they were doing.
I had been playing with Ruby on Rails for a few months and was excited to put my new skills to the test, so I approached my boss about building a licensing web portal for our manufacturer to use.
This is the login page. There are multiple user accounts. Users are tied to groups and identified either as admins or belonging to one of our two manufacturers. Different user groups are exposed to different features of the portal.
Once logged in, the user is presented with a form to fill out about the particular piece of hardware they are licensing. All of this information is stored in a MySQL database, and some of it is used to generate the license key. Rails calls a simple command line utility to generate the key and then the results are presented to the users on the web page. Whenever a new system is licensed, a detailed email is automatically generated and sent to both me and our manufacturing manager.
I took advantage of many of rails built in validation methods to make sure that all required fields are filled out and that there are no duplicates.
All licensed systems are available for view by the organization that licensed them (all are available to admins) and can be edited to fix mistakes or to reflect RMA’d systems or upgrades. The license keys are blacked out in this image so I don’t get in trouble with my company.
There is a search utility that allows the user to search on any attribute of the system.
Not shown is the ability to export all records in CSV format, a text format that can be easily imported into Excel and other spreadsheet programs.
