The whiteboard ticker is a superb tool for communicating everything from major incidents to future outages. However, whilst it is on by default in Self-Service it is not for support staff using the core application. This post will address two issues:
a) How to turn the ticker on by default and
b) How to change the default refresh period to something other than 30 minutes
To fix both these issues we need to do a couple of hacks in options_nailogo.asp (located in C:Program FilesBMCService Desk ExpressApplication Server by default)
As these are hacks, please please please take a backup of this file before following the remainder of this post. Additionally, it is worth noting that after you install a patch from BMC for Service Desk Express, you need to check to see if the patch overwrote these hacks. If so, just reapply them.
Ok, so with that stuff covered let’s look at these two issues:
How to turn the ticker on by default?
This one is a complete doddle and there have been many posts in the MagicSolutions forums regarding how to do this. Open options_nailogo.asp in Notepad and scroll down until you see a line that looks like:
<body style="background-image:url(images/header_main_bkgd.gif); background-repeat:repeat-x;padding:0px; margin:0px;margin:0;border:0;height:100%;overflow:auto" onload="WindowLoad()" onunload="WinUnload()">
Edit this line so it looks like:
<body style="background-image:url(images/header_main_bkgd.gif); background-repeat:repeat-x;padding:0px; margin:0px;margin:0;border:0;height:100%;overflow:auto" onload="WindowLoad();StartWBTimer()" onunload="WinUnload()">
Save the file, log out and log back into Service Desk Express and you are done.
How to change the default refresh period to something other than 30 minutes?
This one is a little more complicated although not much. A while back someone in the group wanted to be able to default the ticker refresh period to five minutes as opposed to 30 minutes.
Open options_nailogo.asp in Notepad and scroll down a little where you’ll find some code that looks like:
<script Language="JavaScript">
var timerID=null;
var sRefreshTime=30
var timerRunning=false
var bPPS = ("1" == "<%= Response.Write((bPPS? "1" : "0"))%>")
var coldiv = "250px, *";
var fmstCall = "frmstNavDash";
var sUserName = "<%=DbConn.User.Name%>"
</script>
Edit this to look like:
<script Language="JavaScript">
var timerID=null;
var sRefreshTime=5
var timerRunning=false
var bPPS = ("1" == "<%= Response.Write((bPPS? "1" : "0"))%>")
var coldiv = "250px, *";
var fmstCall = "frmstNavDash";
var sUserName = "<%=DbConn.User.Name%>"
</script>
Save the file, log out and log back into Service Desk Express and you are done. The refresh rate will now default to 5 minutes.
Hope this is helpful. Any comments, as always, are very welcome.
JOATIT 
how bout the speed?
This is not working for me in SDE 9.8.159. Has something changed? I have Windows 2003 SP2. This used to work for me, and I’ve modified my options_nailogo.aspx file exactly as shown here. I even went so far as to Recycle my SDE Application pool, rename the “commonmain” folder to “commonmain-old”, deleted all rows in SMSYSPROCESS, and had my users clear their cache. The only way I can get the ticker to scroll is by manually clicking “Start” under the Crisis Management.
Spoke too soon. (Maybe you should delete my comments.) The function name is apparently case sensitive I had written startWBTimer(). Changing it to StartWBTimer() fixed it. Thanks for your blog!
Hi Justin,
Thanks for commenting…and explaining your error. I left it as it is the type of error that anyone can make. Glad the blog is helpful.
Regards,
Alan