If we are a VAR and acquire the SDK to develop a SDK application and we want to run this application in the environment of our customers, must the customers buy the SDK?
Deivin - Your client does not need to purchase the SDK in order for you to deploy your new SDK application. The only expense for your client is to ensure that they have the appropriate number of client licenses for your new application to access Laserfiche.
As far as actually deploying your new SDK application it has been my experience that when you install an SDK application on a machine that has the full Laserfiche client installed you should not have to worry about the need to distribute any additional SDK libraries
However, if you are installing your SDK application on a machine that does not already have a full Laserfiche client installation then you will need to distribute the SDK runtime installer as well as your SDK application. The SDK runtime installer installs all of the necessary Laserfiche libraries for your SDK application to run appropriately.
The SDK runtime installer filename is 'LaserficheSDKRuntimeInstaller.exe' and should be found in the "\RuntimeInstallation" subfolder on the development machine where you installed your SDK. I would also think that you can also search the Laserfiche support site for the appropriate version of the SDK runtime installer to use.
Note that upgrading the client installation may change what dependencies are present on the machine and cause your SDK application to no longer work (due to missing dependencies). For this reason it's strongly recommended that you use the runtime installer instead of piggy-backing on another product.
Brian - Then you would recommend installing the SDK Runtime on any machine that an SDK app is deployed on, regardless if the full client is installed? My only concern would be potentially conflicting library versions. Is that not a valid concern?
Brian, do you still need to distribute the runtimeinstaller.exe if the Laserfiche application is built using the merge modules?
Cliff: We take care to resolve any issues with library versions on our end. It's the same methods that allow you to run any combination of Laserfiche software on the same machine without problems.
Ben: The merge modules and the runtime installer are the two supported ways of getting the Laserfiche dependencies installed. The runtime installer is more fool-proof, and the merge modules are of course an option only if you are writing your own installation, which is the case for probably 10% of SDK applications. But if you are writing your own installer you can decide which solution to use.