Serendipitous Cerebration – Part Next to Last

One of the last hurtles we were presented with during this project was the ILINX Content Store login screen. The Login screen was written in “Windows Presentation Foundation”, and while Integrate can identify the screen WPF wasn’t cooperating on allowing us to insert any values into the Username and Password fields. Getting the required Username/Password for the current login was a matter of a VB script pulling the AD credentials. Like I said, we have the needed login values but without being able to find/select input fields we felt pretty sunk. Then it dawned on us, the curser always starts in what we will refer to as “PlaceX”. To make a short story drawn out into a long story short again, we used another chunk of script mimicking the keyboard controls to navigate the page and input the login credentials into the required entry fields. So we are ready to deploy. We created a network file share titled “Integrate_Projects”, created an “Integrate” AD Users group, assigned read access to the share, and placed the appropriate users into the “Integrate” group. The workstations install procedure for the ILINX Integrate client involved using the Installer, for those Win 7 users we had to add the laborious step to “Run As Administrator”. Configurations on each workstation is simply opening the Integrate settings and telling Integrate where to find the .kap file. For this project we had around 10 workstation installs. Install and configure for all took less than 55 minutes even after finding and correcting a few minor bugs and running down workstations through the cube farm labyrinth without any string to fund our way back. During the installs we showed all the workers how to use the new tool, training was very easy and went something like this; “When you open an AP or AR invoice a button will pop up, press that button and your document opens in a browser window. Let’s take a look.” As always this project was met by the end users just like any other project Go Live with a mix of people happy to see a useful tool implemented and parading the Engineer around the office on their shoulders and the workers who amble around the office shouting “CHANGE BAD!” like they were a green skinned/bold necked scientific lusus naturae fleeing a crowd of pitchforks and torches. It all was feeling good and then it happened, one of those early morning emails that you know hides a choice little nugget of frustration before you open it; yep I was right Dr. Frankenstein put in a ticket. Something happened and now the Integrate buttons pop up, but pressing the Integrate button does nothing more than making clicky mouse noises and populating the user’s faces with confused/irritated looks. This email was the doorman that let Mr. Serendipitous Cerebration in to assist in the resolution of this issue and we’ll get to review is working style in the final episode of …

 

Random Kurt-Patrick Duncan McParks
ImageSource Inc.