Custom Software

Over the years we have developed software for our clients to meet very specialized needs. These products are not suitable for general marketing, partly because there is a low demand and secondly because they would require tailoring for each sites. If you want more information on any of these, send us an email. Be aware though that these programs would need significant tailoring for your environment and would cost thousands of dollars, not hundreds.

PCCOP – This program uses a database of rules to ensure the correct files are placed on a workstation at boot up. It provides a base suite of software on all machines and then allows individual workstations to have different versions of particular products. It has functionality to also run upgrades as required. This was built specifically for a client before SMS or any other software distribution product was available. However, they like it so much they are still using it and developing it after 10 years.

Flash – This runs as a service and intelligently mirrors file structures on to other servers or workstations. It is driven by control files that allow a high level of control over the source and destination for files and how often checking is done. It is very efficient, only copying those files that are changed. It ensures that low speed links are not saturated. It has restart capability and when copying a large file, it creates a new file so that the old file is still available during the copy process. It comes with central reporting of activity and is designed for when you want to keep GB of data in synch across 50+ servers.

Migrator – When replacing workstations or migrating to a new operating system, there is a lot of work involved in backing up and restoring old data, reinstalling additional software and reinstating specific settings etc. This program was tailored for a particular customer, but could form the basis of software at another site. It can be tailored to make any configuration changes to satisfy the new Operating system.

Backup Service – This runs as a service on a workstation and takes a backup to a server of all data held on that machine. It provides excellent central reporting. Rules control which files are backed up. By scanning a standard Machine rules are automatically created to exclude “standard” files.

Create User – This runs in a Windows 2000 environment and does such things as creating the account, the home share, the Profile, group membership, Citrix profiles and Citrix shares. It can clone existing accounts, move users between organizational sections, delete users (backing up files as it goes) and rename users. It runs with elevated privileges so you don’t need to be a domain administrator. A lot of the decision making is externalized via control files, but additional business rules can be easily included in the program.

SMS Manager – This program provides a simple interface for occasional users of SMS. It allows creation of packages, creation of groups, addition of machine to groups, package refreshing etc. It also provides simple queries for routine tasks such as what machine a user has used, what packages each machine has etc. One great thing about it is that it uses direct SQL calls to the SMS databases. The result is that it is much faster!.

Networked Backup – We haven’t written this yet, but it could be a real challenge! Most sites never backup files on workstations because it is too hard and would take up too much server disk space. This software would run on each workstation and do backups to other workstations. The cost of space is nothing since there is many GB of free space on normal machines. Each workstation would be backed up on multiple machines and it could even ensure the backup was “offsite”. Machines would negotiate to see who did the backup and if a backup was not done within the required time, another machine would do it. Security issues would need to be addressed, probably by stating that normal users can only restore to the original machine. Old versions of files would be retained and easy rules created to control which files were included or excluded.