'Smart' Admin Tool?

[handlep]

Hi All, hope you can help me out here. I'll try not to be too long-winded on this:

Sometime ago I perceived the need to allow the Team Leaders the ability to do very simple admin tasks, such as changing agent names, for example. Bits and pieces like this were taking up too much time for my team, and don't exactly require a technician's skills. Now, obviously I was not going to let all these team leaders have access to the switch, too risky - especially as you can't restrict them to only play with their own stuff.

So, we developed a 'Smart' tool, which works like this. Using DSA (or ASA now), we export all agent data, to a file on a server. We then display that info on a web page, giving the viewer the ability to edit the details. These changed records are saved to another file, which we later import back into the switch. This works fine on a manual basis.

My problem is that although we can schedule the export to happen when we want, using the DSA scheduler, we can't do the same with the import. With the import, you have to open the file in DSA, and then schedule that specific import to run later. This means you always have to manually intervene, to get the latest new details file, before scheduling. We've tried using a macro tool, to automatically go through the file opening, etc., and although this works under test conditions, in practice we found it failed too often to be reliable.

So, to my question, has anyone out there ever tried anything like this, or have any ideas? All suggestions gratefully received

 

[Armo2]

Hi,

This is actually pretty straght forward. If you do the import manually first. Then, in the bottom of the screen, click on the schedule tab. Then right-click on the import that you have just done manually (it should have a succesfull flag) and select schedule. From there simply select the times you want. This definetly works in ASA 1.10.

Hope this helps,

Chris

 

[handlep]

Thanks Chris, but no, it's not that straightforward. Yes, you can schedule that import, but if you put in several dates/times, you will always be importing the same information, which is obviously no good. The new details file will change every day, and so needs to be manually opened in ASA, before you can schedule the import.

I'm pretty sure ASA can't do it, as it stands, so I'm hoping someone might have another method or idea.

Thanks again for the reply.

 

[VLG711]

You could try an app called script-it it comes with Windows NT here is the overview from Microsoft.

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This White Paper describes Microsoft ScriptIt, a tool for automating interactive software installations and system configuration tasks. ScriptIt works by monitoring the window titles of active processes. When it finds a window with which it should interact, it sends a set of keystrokes to that window. ScriptIt uses the window title or a combination of the window title and text that appears on controls within the window to identify the window that will receive the keystrokes. The use of the window title combined with text allows ScriptIt to differentiate between multiple windows that have the same title bar.
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This should allow you to build a script that would build a new download every night.

vlg-711

 

[handlep]

Thanks VLG-711 (catchy name ), I'll look into that.