Creating a Custom Management Interface for any Windows Application

Recently I posted an article about creating a new Custom Management Interface using the Microsoft Management Console up at faxlearning.wordpress.com. This article specifically focuses on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition, but the concepts apply to any Windows application. Check out the article and let me know what you think, either here or on the faxlearning blog site.

You can also watch a video version of the tutorial at youtube.com/opentextfddg.

Coming full circle - Open Text and Captaris

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Setting up SMTP Integration with Rightfax

I just finished my class in Dubai and a student asked about SMTP integration. My throat was shot and I was barely able to think straight, so I didn't have an answer for him. But after I had a chance to recover, I tried it out and came up with this little screencast on the problem. Its very easy as you can see here. By the way, this video is now hosted on YouTube, Google Video, and Revver. Revver is by far the best of these because I can actually see what I am doing.

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Transitioning the Blogs

As a reader of this blog, you know there are three things that I care about and write about: Travel, Gadgets, and Captaris. But most of you are interested in only one of those topics. Well, at the recent Captaris International Partner Conference I was invited to start blogging on the Captaris Developer Portal and saw this as a chance to move one of the audiences to a place that is more relevant to them. So starting now all posts about Captaris Workflow, Rightfax, and Alchemy will be posted on my new blog at the Captaris Developer Portal. On the site I am TrainerMatt and my blog is: http://www.captaris.com/DeveloperProgram/blogs/trainermatt_blog/default.aspx

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License Types in Alchemy

When you purchase Alchemy, you can purchase several different license types. Administrator gives all knowing access to everything. Index can still add content. Search just searches. Administrator costs the most, and Search the least. So a company will typically get many Search licenses, a few

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A Simple Search Application for Alchemy

One of my students this week asked about creating an extremely simple search client for Alchemy. Out of the box, Alchemy Search can be fairly easy to use, but there are still a lot of buttons that one could press. And if all you want is a simple search to show all the documents across all your repositories it may be a bit too much. So I created what has to be one of the simplest UIs possible:

As you type in the search box at the top left, results start showing up in the list below:

Then you just click on a document and you get a preview:

You can continue typing and your search is refined. No need to press enter. So how did I get here? Well, its just a simple Windows form application with a SplitContainer. On the right side I have the Alchemy Viewer, and on the left is a text box and a listbox. Whenever the text in the text box changes, it does the search again. One of the benefits of Alchemy is that the search is extremely quick, so this app is amazingly quick.

When I do the search I have to ensure that the text doesn't end with and or or. If it does, then don't pass it to the search because those are keywords we use. Then I clear the textbox and clear the query. The search itself is easy:

auQuery.AddFullTextQuery(tbSearch.Text);
auQuery.SearchGroup(auSGroup);

if (auQuery.Results.Count > 0)
{
    foreach (Alchemy.Result aResult in auQuery.Results)
    {
        foreach (Alchemy.Item aItem in aResult.Items)
        {
            lbResults.Items.Add(aItem.Title);
        }
    }
}

This also populates the listbox. Then when I click on an item, I tell the Viewer to ViewItem(). It took all of 20 minutes to write ugly code while exhausted. Give me another 30 minutes to clean it up and I might be willing to share it. Of course, this assumes you have Alchemy.

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Picking Alchemy Databases on a Server

Earlier today I had a need to choose databases from a server to show up in Alchemy Administrator. The problem was that the server wasn't on a domain (its my development server which is running in a VirtualPC vm). I couldn't find the server easily, so I thought there had to be a better way. So I created a tool to make it easier. When you first launch it, you get this:

Enter a server

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Resize a webform automatically

When designing a workflow in Captaris Workflow, one of your options is to use WebForms for all the UI. When doing this, we will usually open the form to some less than useful size and the enduser will usually resize the form to be able to use it. Resizing the form automatically is easy enough to do, but I always forget what the JavaScript should look like to do that. So here it is...just stick this in the PageLoad method and set the size to the right size for that form. Easy... Hopefully next time I need it, I won't have to search for 10 minutes for this no-brainer...

Page.RegisterClientScriptBlock("tpCustomScript",

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Captaris Workflow - Getting the Overdue Event to Fire

One of the common questions I get from Captaris customers is how to get the overdue event to fire. The reason this question comes up is that some of our method names are downright confusing, and I think we changed something here because it doesn't look the same as I remember it.

In Captaris Workflow, there are a series of events that fire on any given task: Ready, Execute, Overdue, Failed, Reset, and Complete. Ready fires when the task is ready, but nothing has been done. Execute means a task has started but not necessarily finished. Overdue means the time alloted to complete the task has passed, but its not complete yet. Failed means something went wrong. Reset happens when the task is reset by the owner or administrator. And Complete means the task is complete and moves on to the next. At each one of these events, something can happen...anything you want.

There are two ways to set when that overdue event fires. By default, the task becomes overdue 1 year after it becomes ready. Usually you will want to change that. The easiest way is to drag the Set Overdue Date custom action on to the Ready event of the task and set it to the relative date it will be overdue. This will be Now plus some amount of time. There is no coding required to do this. But sometimes you will want a bit more flexibility that what this offers. For that, use the SetReminderForOverdueEvent method. It expects a DateTime, so just give it a time for when the overdue event should fire.

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Using Powershell to manage Alchemy - Add local users to a Role

Today in an Captaris Alchemy class I got an interesting question. One of the students has a customer who wants to use local users instead of domain users when setting up integrated security. Integrated security is where you can authorize users to view databases, folders, and/or files based on the username they are logged in as. Normally associating the database ‘roles’ with domain users makes the most sense, but occasionally there is a need to set up local users. Now the problem is that the Server Console UI doesn’t allow for anything other than domain users. So the only way to add a local user is through the Alchemy API. Before Powershell that would have probably meant breaking out Visual Studio. But now I think it is far easier to deal with. Here is a sample script that will take two parameters: a role name you want to add a user to, and a user name in the format servername\username.

param($role=$(Throw "A role name is required..."),

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