Out of the box Service Desk Express supports a number of remote control solutions that allow support analysts to take control of the user’s desktop and support them. Recently, I was asked if Service Desk Express would support Microsoft’s Remote Assistance tool. After a day of messing about, I finally managed to deliver a rather elegant (well at least I and the customer thought so) solution that I thought I would share:
For those of you who have never seen Microsoft Remote Assistance, it is, believe it or not, included out of the box with Windows XP. The problem is that it is incredibly hard to find! To use it from your desktop, create a shortcut pointing to:
%WINDIR%Explorer.exe "hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/ Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/UnsolicitedRCui.htm"
Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?!?
Now once you actually find it, it works rather nicely providing complete auditing, handshake etc. So now I needed to get this launched from inside Service Desk Express. This was where the fun started.
I knew that the solution lay with the Program Launcher application that comes with Service Desk Express beyond patch 9.12 (many thanks to David Sullivan for posting the URL to the documentation for that in the MagicSolutions forum (http://www.bmc.com/supportu/documents/90/41/69041/69041.pdf)). However, it wasn’t quite as simple as I had hoped.
For some reason I couldn’t get the link to work with the Program Launcher application due to all the quote marks, forward and backward slashes etc. That was probably my lack of knowledge…
However, after much ado I discovered (thanks to Google) that you can launch the Windows Help Center itself passing a URL for the hcp file mentioned above. So to get this to work:
Log onto the Service Desk Express application server and run builder.exe that lives in C:Program FilesBMCService Desk ExpressTools. You should be greeted with a screen that looks like the example below:
In the Filename textbox enter: RemoteAssistance.asp
In the Command line textbox enter:
C:WINDOWSPCHEALTHHELPCTRBinariesHelpCtr.exe -url hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/ Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/UnsolicitedRCui.htm
and click Build Launch File.
Now using Form Customisation you can add a Customised Toolbar Button of type link to, for example, your incident form, specifying a URL of:
http://<SDE ServerName>/SDE/RemoteAssistance.asp
The elegant bit came from hacking the Microsoft Remote Assistance htm page to accept a querystring parameter such that I can prefill the Machine Name with the machine name of the asset selected on Incident form. I’ll explain how to do that in the next post.
As always, comments gratefully received – thanks for reading.
JOATIT 