Network connections required by CCDC desktop software

Overview

As a general rule, CCDC desktop products are fully functional offline once the software has been installed and the licence activated, and customer data is never sent to the CCDC.

Installation and updates

We provide 2 types of installers; an online and offline installer. We recommend using the online installer as it makes access to future updates easier. The online installer will need to communicate with our online repository https://install.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/ to download the necessary components. You can choose to use the offline installer which has all the necessary components bundled so no communication with our online repository is needed. Note that if you use the offline installer, additional steps will be needed to set up the database (I installed the CSD Portfolio with the Windows offline installer and the software is complaining that it can't find the data) and access updates or you could choose to carry out a complete uninstall and reinstall to access updates in the future (How to update a CSD Portfolio installation which was installed with the offline installer).

If the online installer was used, the software will connect to the online repository to run an automatic check for updates after it has been open for 5 minutes. This feature can be disabled if desired.

Similarly, if installing the CSD Python API into your own Python environment, you can access our channels online via https://conda.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/ or https://pip.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/ or download an offline copy of each channel.

Licensing

Once the software is installed, the machine is licensed either from the command line or via the software activation GUI. A standard online activation requires a connection to https://license-api.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/. You can also choose to carry out an offline activation which involves generating a file and completing the activation from our licence portal (How to activate CCDC software without a direct internet connection on the system that it is installed on). This will avoid your machine having to connect to our license server. The downside to an offline activation is similar to using the offline installer in that when your licence is renewed, the new expiration date is not automatically applied to your machine, you will need to reactivate using the offline activation to update the information stored locally on your machine. If you do choose to carry out an online activation, when Mercury is started, a check is made against our license server to confirm the licence is still active and if any updates have been made to the expiration date.

Telemetry (optional)

The CCDC would like to collect some anonymous, basic, diagnostic data on which CSD applications and features are used (product telemetry). You will be asked if you would like to opt-in during installation, or during the first start of an application after installation. For more details please see https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/telemetry.

Other

While the main user guides are installed on hard disk with the software, some menu options access documentation on the CCDC website and elsewhere. Also the Python API scripts shipped with Mercury and Hermes may access external sites, for example to fetch protein files from the PDB and ZINC databases.