I just upgraded to version 7 and the options for user interaction windows and timeouts seem to have vanished (or at least I can’t find them). I used to be able to configure an action to where a user was prompted with a window where they could postpone the action or the reboot for a set amount of time (say 12 hours) but ALSO if the user did not respond to the message within a different amount of time (say 1 minute) the action would proceed without any more prompts or waiting.
What seems to happen now is that I no longer see the setting in the action properties for the message timeout and whatever value I set for the amount of time a user has to postpone the client will just sit there for the full amount and wait to run the action and reboot until the time runs out.
The old behavior was very useful for machines where a user was logged in but was away from their desk at night or whatever. If someone happend to be working you could give them a chance to postpone for 6 hours but the vast majority would simply start running the action after displaying the prompt for 1 minute.
Why did this go away? I really hope that I’m missing how to configure this in the new version, otherwise I REALLY want it back!
The message box and restart tabs on the Take Action Dialog were reorganized to be more clear and at the same time, we addressed a couple of issues that people had reported. Specifically, we made the “deadline” be a set time or amount of time from when the action started. This was in response to the problem that the “old way” of setting countdowns that were restarted every time the user hit “postpone” was problematic because the user could postpone indefinitely and you could never be sure when the actions would run.
Our plan is to add some lower time limits than the current 15 minute minimum in the next point release.
Thanks for the info. I recognize the need to fix that loop hole but - I really liked the differentiation on the two sets of timers. The new user interface looks nice though.
One more thing, the text within the message displayed while an action is taking place doesn’t appear to “wordwrap” correctly and makes the user scroll left/right to see it.
Is it possible to have an option to not set a deadline, which could skip the first ‘Action Requests’ dialog and go right to the ‘Confirmation Required’ dialog? Our users have become used to the message coming up, then hitting ‘restart now’. The new way doesn’t show the message until they click on the action. I think we will have a lot of confused users if we deploy patches with the new message.
I tried the “_BESClient_ActionManager_HasMainDialog” setting, and it doesn’t seem to change the action requests dialog. It looks like it forces the “Support Center” view to the action requests dialog.
I guess what I am really looking for is 2 different things:
A deadline of 0 with no option to postpone.
A restart dialog similar to the previous version, or the same as the new confirmation required dialog that comes up after you click take action.
I wanted to follow up my original post. It’s been a couple of months now and I am still feeling like I’ve lost functionality with the new version’s way of handling notification. Being able to set a timeout for the user to respond to the prompt for executing the action or a reboot that was SEPARATE from the postponement time was a great feature that I no longer have. I also miss being able to configure a totally silent package that reboots without a user prompt/countdown.
I know the changes were done for a reason but is there not some middle ground where the previous functionality can be brought back?