Workstation Manager

Workstation Manager is the natural lead-on product from the Workstation Auditor.   It is the premier Monitoring and Management system for networked workstations, adding workstation configuration management, application usage control, asset tracking and is your early warning system for impending workstation issues.   Workstation Manager is aimed at seamlessly managing workstations throughout their full lifecycle.

Audit++

It combines the exceptional auditing capabilities of Workstation Auditor with comprehensive live workstation monitoring, management and scripting features.
It simplifies the processes of:

• Managing local workstation configurations
• Application installation and updates
• Controlling application usage with rules
• Halting the spread of malware
• Monitoring system performance
• Tracking Assets and providing insurance information
• Network Server, Printing and SAN Migration

Make IT Easy!

Gone are the days when a workstation update meant having squads of engineers going from machine to machine making changes weekend after weekend, taking anything up to 30 minutes per PC.   With Workstation Manager, changes happen instantly and with 100% accuracy, cutting help desk calls and user frustration.

Default Capabilities

Workstation Manager is a general purpose execution platform, capable of performing migration and management functions like the ability to remotely switch Novell Client protocols and configure SLP settings, without needing the user to run ACU, or even be attached to a Novell environment.   There are a number of standard management tasks that make changes to workstations including:

• Changing Windows settings like owner and organisation name
• Managing USB drivers across all ports to avoid needing to plug a device into every port and reapplying the driver
• Deploy, install and remove applications in executable, MSI and Novell AXT forms
• Rename computers
• Join the correct Microsoft Domain or Active Directory
• Maintain hotfix and service packs
• Adjusting the Network Configuration of the machine with functions like removing a Novell client
• Adding, changing or disconnecting permanent mappings a user may have
• Adding, changing or disconnecting printer connections the user has in place
• Making changes to the registry
• Downloading, uploading and other file manipulations
• Globally adjusting the machines for things like changed UNC references
• ... and much more!

UNC Management

One task that is an absolute life-saver with server migrations is the Manage UNCs task which quickly (100ms) switches all UNCs containing references to a specific server and path to a new server and path across the local machine's registry, desktop shortcuts and INI files globally.   This allows all workstation references to ServerX to be redirected to ServerY for all services, in the blink of an eye.   This capability allows your organisation to redirect workstations from server based storage to a SAN, for example, thus following their data as it is migrated

Scripting Tasks

Whilst the addition of Live Monitoring Task capabilities is a major step forward, the biggest technical leap has been the inclusion of a comprehensive script language into Uniboss client Agent and Child Modules.   This allows agents to perform all manner of change or local processing using a very powerful script language.   The reasons behind the script language enhancement are manyfold, but were primarily to:

• Give system owners the ability to construct their own management tasks, pertinent to their needs
• Have Lanboss focus on development of the language itself, rather than 'situation specific', hard coded tasks
• Expose a rich function library that incorporates sufficient 'smarts' to make it a formidable toolset
• Provide many pre-built scripts either to be used as-is, or as a basis for a new script

The language itself is Pascal script, with many auditing and management enhancements to give it immense power.   The script language is the primary subject of its own guide and will only be shown briefly in this material.

Alerting Tasks

Every task has the inherent ability to generate alerts based on the data found, in general these are raised when the task itself is run.   Outside of that, there are a range of dedicated tasks that perform specific functions to check for changing states and raise alerts if these exceed a given threshold.   These tasks are generally very quick in terms of runtime so that they have little or no perceivable impact and can thus be run very frequently.

An example of all of the above is with disk space checking.   Although the full scan task auditing will raise an alert if the scan finds that the disks will run out of space in less than 3 months, the Alerting version of the task doesn't perform a full scan (with allied categorisation and subsequent calculations), but rather just does a % free check and raises an alert if this goes too low.   The latter has virtually no impact compared to the former.

Live Monitoring Tasks

A new addition to the agent capabilities in v4.x has been a new concept in task processing, the Live task.   A Live task is one that:

1. Runs permanently, often as a dedicated thread for handling Windows messages and events
2. Has a data gathering interval, at which time summaries and lists are passed to the Tasks Engine

The primary difference is that a Live task only works when something happens in Windows, like a program is launched, whereas regular tasks have to poll for their information on every pass.   A regular task would thus need to re-read the entire process list, then compare it to a previously stored one, just to be able to sense that a new program has been launched.   If the regular task runs hourly, it would not notice a program that was run in the interim. Live tasks get notified of every program startup, and they can accumulate lists for each and every event.   All program launches are noticed, with the lowest possible overhead, altogether a much better approach!

This task type is uses in the agent's Application Metering with foreground window tracking and application quarantining capabilities, using a number of Windows hooks to be notified of new processes or desktop window changes.   The thread is them able to react by adding to a list of programs used for reporting later to the Tasks Engine.

Advanced Reporting Engine

As part of the Lanboss Product Philosophy [that its products should not require additional applications to become useful], Workstation Manager includes a fully fledged report designer in the console.

The FastReport designer is a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to embed SQL and scripts into reports to produce custom reports of your choosing.   The engine is a banded report generator capable of producing multi-level Master-Detail reports as well as graphical summary outputs.   Of course, the system includes over 100 standard reports, but these can be used as templates for your own customised versions.

Query Builder

Not every situation calls for a dedicated report and for this reason, Lanboss created the Query Builder interface.   It is laid out and used in the same way as that of most Microsoft query engines to make it familiar to those who are used to manipulating SQL using Microsoft tools.   The query builder allows for ad-hoc SQL queries to be run, refined and stored for later recall.

Moreover, the results of virtually any SQL query can be exported to a variety of formats including XLS, XML, PDF and HTML.   It is also possible to use the results in many cases to create groups, for example a query to find all workstations with French keyboards can be used to populate a machine group that will later be used to update keyboard drivers on only those machines.   Queries built here can be used across many aspects of the system.

Auto Reporter

Not only does the Workstation Manager client module have the ability to run scripts, but so too does the Proxy server.   Although the script language is capable of performing virtually any operation, in this context it is possible to have it automatically prepare reports and send these automatically via eMail on a periodic basis.   It is also possible for it to perform queries and make decisions based on the data it finds.   This makes your Lanboss Workstation Manager a proactive monitoring and reporting system.