BES 7.0 Techinician View

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by dgibson91)

Two of the new features we were interested in for 7.0 is the new technician view and the client UI dashboard.

"The BES Agent user interface also presents an optional technician’s view and computer information dashboard for IT support. The technician’s

view and the BES Client UI are fully customizable."

“Added a dashboard view feature for the BES Client UI to display computer property information like hardware properties or patch status.”

“A separate technician dashboard can also be viewed by hitting ctrl-alt-shift-t in the BES Client UI.”

I found “TriggerClientUI.exe” which brings up the Bigfix Support Center and shows current offers and recent actions.

Is there more to this? I don’t see any computer properties in this screen. Is there more documentation on these features? How do we customize it, and what can be customized? Also, I can’t seem to get the CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-T shortcut key to work. Where can this be done, and what does it let you do?

I tried searching your web site, but i couldn’t find any documentation on this.

Thanks,

Daryl

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Daryl,

Yes… These are very cool and we hope that many of our customers find good use for these… We have some documentation in our BES Administrator’s guide (page 60 of http://support.bigfix.com/product/documents/BESAdminGuide-7.0.pdf), but I will try to publish some better documentation shortly.

The short answer to your question is that you put a file _technician.html in the __UISupport folder of the agent’s data folder (default location C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client\__BESData\__UISupport) and then CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-T from the agent UI will trigger this dashboard (which is relevance and HTML). Or… you can use the file _dashboard.html and it will be a dashboard view visible to the end user (you can use both dashboards). You will need to restart the BES Client whenever you put these files in place or whenever you change these files.

Attached are two simple examples that you can use for testing… Better docs and examples will come later…

This page might be useful too:

http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=441

Ben

3

(imported comment written by dgibson91)

I understand how it works now. Thanks.

I didn’t see in the documentation how to deploy these dashboards. Is it something we create a custom action to do, or is there a recommended way to deploy them?

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(imported comment written by jessewk)

Currently you’ll need to use a custom action.

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(imported comment written by tim7ad91)

Is there hot key sequence that can launch TriggerUI.exe? I see that once you have it open you can use the CTRL SHFT ALT T to launch the Technician tab, but wondering what folks are doing to launch TriggerUI.exe initially?

Also, are there any other hot key sequences that are undocumented (or documented for that matter).

Thanks,

Tim

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Tim,

There is no special hot-keys to open the BigFix Client UI… but you can use DDE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Data_Exchange) to open the Client UI (which is how that TriggerUI.exe file works).

Ben

7

(imported comment written by bigbao91)

Hello,everybody

i read upstairs posts but i cant understand where i can found the BigFix Client UI.What i can notice is a process of BESClientUi.exe.

can anyone give me a example of using BESClientUi?

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi bigbao,

Only BES Clients 7.0+ have the BESClientUI.exe.

Ben

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(imported comment written by tim7ad91)

Ben,

Thanks for update and reminder about DDE.

bigbao,

On BES 7.0 you have to run TriggerUI.exe to see the UI. The default location for TriggerUI.exe and the BESClientUI.exe is C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client.

I’m sure one of the engineers\developers here can explain how it works. From my observation, TriggerUI.exe just makes the BESClientUI process, that is already running, visible. Hence the name - it just triggers it. After launching TriggerUI, I never see a “TriggerUI.exe” process.

Thanks,

Tim

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(imported comment written by bigbao91)

Yes,i see the UI by running TriggerUI.exe.

Thanks ben and tim.