Creating a Custom Management Interface for Alchemy (or any other application)

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Did you know that you can create a custom management interface for pretty much any Windows application with zero coding? Did you realize that you probably already have all the tools needed to get this done on your Windows workstation? Well you do, assuming your version of Windows was created in the last 10 to 15 years. The Microsoft Management Console, or MMC, was first made available for NT4 and Windows 9x and is the framework on which many built-in and 3rd party management tools are based. Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition ships with a few MMC-based tools, including the Server Console, and the Web management tools. The reason I am tell you about this is that it was the solution to an interesting issue a customer asked me about recently.

You see, they had a decent number of people who would be contributing information to an Alchemy repository. But after the training I delivered, they realized that the Administrator application gives those who use it a bit too much power, especially when it comes to completely destroying a database. The problem is that the Administrator is the only client application that can initiate a Build. So if they end up using Index Station for most of their users, how do they trigger a Build?

At first I suggested Scheduled Tasks. You can create a task that saves credentials and then can be run from the command line. The command I was going to run was albatch, which is a command line driven tool that comes out of the box with Alchemy. Unfortunately I couldn’t get albatch to work on a remote machine. Even with a SysInternals tool called psexec, I still couldn’t get anything going. So that’s when I remembered the MMC approach. I’ll explain both psexec and albatch in more detail in a short while.

My first experiment with MMC was when I was in the Education Marketing Group at Microsoft. I spent a good deal of time building cool demos of the technology that was part of Windows 2000. One of those demos involved allowing a group administrator or receptionist to reset the passwords of the workers in their group. That’s a function you can perform from Active Directory Users & Computers, but that’s a pretty daunting tool to use. If you create a new MMC and add the AD U&C Snap-In, you can drill down to a specific group or OU. Once there you create a taskpad when displaying a list of users, save the view and you have a custom password reset tool that can cause no extra problems. You can create this tool from scratch in less than 2 minutes with zero coding. I think that is pretty cool.

The tool I wanted to create for Building Alchemy was the Alchemy Builder Console, with one button each for building the databases in my environment. Here is a picture of the console configured to build just a single repository.

So how do you create this? Well, I am glad you asked. The first step is to launch MMC. Close the tree and maximize the main window. On the Menu bar, click Action and choose New TaskPad View. For this simple MMC, I like to use No List for the style. Next your way through the rest of the windows, giving the MMC a name along the way. When it comes to creating the first task, choose Shell Command. This tells the MMC that when you click on the button, you are going to run a command at the command prompt. So what is that command going to be?

This is where psexec and albatch come into view. Albatch comes with Alchemy and provides command-line access to many of the features of the product. The parameters are as follows:

albatch <database-path> /<command> <other-parameters>

So to build a server controlled database called Total on a server named Server, I need to run:

albatch alchemy://server/total.ald /build

That command works fine if you are on the server, but I need to run it from a remote PC. To run the command remotely, I can run psexec which is in the pstools suite from SysInternals.

In case you haven’t heard of SysInternals, go to their site now and read about all of their tools. Every single one of them is useful. As you can see in the screenshot below, psexec allows me to run an executable on a remote machine. Since I will be running this MMC on other PCs, I need psexec to be able to access albatch on the server.

Of course, you can’t run any command on any machine on your network without a valid username and password. So I created a local user on my server called albuilder. With that in mind, the command I used to run albatch is:

psexec \\server /u alcbuilder /p password "c:\program files\captaris\alchemy\albatch.exe" alchemy://server/total.ald /build

If the program completes with an error code of 0, you know that it ran without any problems. Now that i have a valid command, I can plug that into the shell command dialog in the MMC. To get the screenshot about, I went to the View | Customize window and turned off a few features. I also went to the File menu then Options. From there, choose User Mode Single Window and give the console a name. You can also change the icon if you want.

If you want to see a video walk-through of the entire process, check out the video on our YouTube channel.

The video also shows how to create a custom Event Viewer, as well as a modified Alchemy Server Console that allows you to pick a database from the list and then click the build task. It uses the parameter parsing features of batch files that I had never seen before.

I hope you find this post and the YouTube video useful. If you have any questions, post them here. Also, if you have any ideas for future videos, let me know. Some ideas I am working on include setting up NLB for Shared Services, setting up a Cisco 2611XM router for simple FoIP, using SQL Profiler to get a view of what RightFax does behind the scenes, and more. Come back to this site often to see more from us on these topics.