In one of my previous blog articles I promised to give you a closer look at the Dispatcher Discovery process. It took me a while but now I will fulfill that promise. Together with my colleague Bas van Goor I created an overview of the discovery process and in this article I will walk you through it.

Why do we actually need a discovery process? The RES Automation Manager Agent doesn’t communicate directly with the database. It does so by means of one or more Dispatchers and for an uninterrupted communication process it needs to have a list of functional and reachable Dispatchers in its memory. Building an initial list of Dispatchers in memory is what we ... READ MORE>>

Recently our colleague Anne Plancius visited one of our partners in The Netherlands and they wanted to allow their customers to create their own mailing lists, without making them Domain Administrator. So they concluded that they would like to use RES Automation Manager for this. Here's Anne's story how he managed to get it working. Unfortunately this is not a predefined task yet, so it is not of the simplicity point, click, done. But then it starts to become a 'battle between man and machine', because it should be possible. And still I do not want to disturb our research and development organization with this. And, oh lucky me, with some help of Google, some support of Windows PowerShell and ... READ MORE>>

As we all know you can create an Active Directory User account with RES Automation Manager. But in Europe a challenge will come to create user accounts without spaces. We get a lot of requests on how you can achieve this. So let's take the steps to achieve this. The first steps are to create a logonname based on the following rules. The logonname should be based on last name concatenated with the first character of the first name. To give an example Anne Plancius should get the logonname PlanciusA. In RES Automation Manager you can achieve this with the following steps:

Create a set of parameters which the user needs to fill when he schedules the job with the

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Sometimes customers want to be more in control regarding the caching of large resources on their Dispatchers. They don’t want the Dispatcher to cache large resources during peak network hours and yet the resources need to be readily available when the Agents/users need the software. This article describes how you can configure a scheduled caching action on your Dispatchers. Let’s start with a little background information about Dispatcher caching. Resources from your database are cached on your Dispatchers for distribution to your Agent computers. You can configure your Dispatchers to either cache all resources immediately or when they are needed. This can be done in the Global Settings or in the properties of the Dispatcher. Caching all resources immediately requires ... READ MORE>>

Sometimes we receive support calls from customers who report that their nightly reboot job for the Citrix servers was executed during business hours when users were already logged on to the servers. In most of these cases the cause of this behavior was a database or network problem at the time that the job should have run. Administrators came in the office in the morning, noticed that there was a problem and fixed it. Then the job executed with a delay of several hours. Although RES Software has built several extra checks in the RES Automation Manager code to prevent this from happening there are a few thing you can do to further minimize the risk. Launch window In the ... READ MORE>>