Welcome to our overview and tour of NetSupport Notify,
our desktop alerting and communication solution.
On the screen in front of you, you will see the NetSupport Notify console,
the one of three components that is utilized within the NetSupport Notify
architecture.
The console
is the application used for creating alerts and messages
and sending them out to your user base.
These messages are routed by
our gateway which is our central component for receiving and delivering messages
and ultimately forwards on to the agent component
which is installed on each device that you wish to receive those messages.
Perhaps the easiest way of highlighting very quickly
the NetSupport Notify architecture,
is to run through a simple schematic.
Okay so here is our enterprise
and you will see when we send an alert from our console
through our notification server
it is sent to our LAN and WAN-based devices.
When they receive their alerts
they also send back information confirming receipt of those messages,
which come back to our server
and through to our console
for our real time reporting.
As simple as that!
So let us have a look at the three components individually.
The first is the NetSupport Notify console
which we can see on the screen here.
As a starting point,
we are presented with a message box allowing us to enter a caption and some text.
The caption will be the main attention grabbing text that is accompanying each
alert that is sent.
So let us put something in here...
the "Mail server is down".
And the text message from the Tech Department
in this case may be...
"Do not call us. It is in hand".
So now we have got our message,
we can choose some options.
The first is
"Ensure always visible".
In simple terms, if we check that option,
the notification will be received on each desktop
and will automatically be displayed
square and center on the screen
in the foreground.
Our next option is having a display timer.
A display timer means that once a notification is received on the desktop,
after a given period - in this case ten seconds -
it will automatically close and disappear as well;
particularly handy if some of the recipient devices
are information panels around the offices
that do not have users directly associated with them.
So we can enable our "Automatically close after timer" setting
and we can also give users the option to close it quicker
at any point
just by clicking on the acknowledgement box.
Finally, for more important alerts, we can also
play a sound to accompany the alert.
We will come on to configuring those in due course.
On the right hand side here
you will see we can set the severity of our message:
from a regular piece of news;
a technical announcement;
an alert;
to something really critical -
perhaps a fire in the building.
In the case of this one here, it is a technical alert
so we will specify "Technical"
and then we can choose to either schedule this alert to be sent at a later date
or at regular intervals,
or we can choose to simply send it now.
For this example let us send it now.
And you will see we are connected to one notification gateway -
here it is listed with its address
and off that we currently have five computers broken down into three
different departments.
Again, we will talk about how we can configure and customize the department
structure.
For now, let us just send the record to everybody.
But what we will ask for
is to actually record the acknowledgement from each user
back to our reporting history.
So let us send the message
and see what we get.
And you will see very quickly on my computer
I have now got my "mail server" notification,
the strapline, along with the supporting text
and it is displayed on my screen
and because I set my display timer at ten seconds,
the message has already gone.
You will also notice
that I have actually got confirmation down here that it was received on all five
target computers.
So now would be a good time to have a look at the history
and understand how we track the delivery of these messages.
So, selecting the History tab,
and you will see we have a history of all notifications.
Here is the one that we sent
and you can see here we have confirmation
that it was sent out to those computers
and because we sent it on a ten second display and then hide, each one shows
that is was played and then timed out at the end.
We also have a history here of previous messages that have been sent out
and those where they have been acknowledged by a user.
As you would expect, we can filter this summary information
based on a date range, severity type
or even those that were sent to, or by, a specific user
and operator.
Let us pop out of there for now
and let us talk a bit about history
and the customization options that are available in the product.
You probably saw there
that we had the messages that can be customized. So we can add our logo,
as you can see here.
Because our logo has a black border, if we use our background color
it will take that information from there.
Of course, we can customize our caption text
as well as our background color,
and when we mentioned the fact that we could accompany an alert with a sound,
as you can see here we can incorporate different sounds for different types
of alert levels.
Once that is done
we specify to update
and that will update that information
on the server
and it will then
pass out our new look and feel configuration to all our agents
on a gradual basis over the next sixty minutes.
So we have now got our infrastructure,
we have got our messages that we can send out quickly and effectively
and we have got our history that allows us to track when those messages have been sent.
Now of course the key to Notify
is the ability to deliver immediacy in our messaging.
Whilst an email is an effective way of sending out
information to all users,
we have no control over when those emails will be read and responded to by
our staff within the organization.
With NetSupport Notify,
we can ensure that all devices receive the messages instantly
and, for items of high severity,
we can also track receipt.
So typical examples within the workplace can be something as simple
as sending a message silently to all desktops to advise that there is a
person in reception with a package that needs signing and they are looking for a
certain member of staff,
all the way through
to a warning that there is a fire in the building and that staff must exit via
the West exit,
for example.
On something like that,
we might want to track to ensure that we have evidence to show that all staff
not only received the message, but acknowledged it
at the time.
Now, as we showed on the schematic and have just delivered here, we sent our notifications
out through a central point (our server)
or, as we refer to it, our gateway
component.
You will see we have our notification server shown on the screen here
with its address, serial number and the maximum number of agents that can be
connected to it.
As you would expect, NetSupport Notify can support
multiple servers.
Perhaps in an environment for an organization that has many dispersed offices,
they may have a notification server in each location
and then as a result, messages can be sent from a single point
either to one specific location
or, when it is something more serious - perhaps background technical issues -
can be sent to all remote offices simultaneously
and again, tracked and managed.
In addition,
for both the agents and notification servers, we have built in redundancy,
ensuring that every agent can have the address of at least two
notification servers,
so that if for any reason one is offline,
messages will automatically be routed by
the second server instead.
Again, the key to NetSupport Notify
is in ensuring there is always a guarantee
of delivery for your critical alerts.
Okay, let us close that one down.
So we have had a look at sending out
a quick message and tracking
the acknowledgement and reporting thereof.
Let us have a look at how we can schedule messages.
Now the first thing is we may have routine messages that we need to use
over and over again.
We actually have a history here of the most recent ones, so let us take the
example I used earlier of a package in reception,
for "Mr Smith"
and rather than send it now
what we are going to do is we are going to schedule that message.
Now, when we schedule it, we can either do it daily, weekly, monthly and so on,
at a particular time
and we can start from this date
and then continue forever
or to an end point.
So this allows us to create
pre-canned alerts that are sent out on a repeat frequency across the enterprise.
Good examples, if we were in an education establishment,
might be a reminder to
all staff at four in the afternoon to "don't forget to power off your computers"
and so on.
It could be something that in your organization
every Friday afternoon the mail server is purged
and therefore a message is sent to staff on Friday lunch times to remind them to
remove any
older legacy items in their mailbox to reduce down file sizes
or something along those lines.
But again, the capabilities built into
NetSupport Notify to ensure that messages can be sent
once or on a repeat basis
with a minimum of effort for everybody concerned.
So, given that the gateway is the key central point for
delivering alerts and receiving updates and history back from individual PCs,
let us have a look at the configuration options available for the gateway component.
As you can see, we can control what ports and IP interfaces the gateway machine
listens on for our particular component.
We can also control
where the event log is stored
for that gateway machine
and of course, a full history then of activity is recorded away.
We have a "Keys" tab here
which controls what keys have been created on the gateway
for access.
We can choose to control access to the gateway
in terms of being able to send messages,
by creating operator accounts
and if we enable the option here,
we can specify which operators within your organization
are able to actually send notifications.
We also have the ability to manage the history
so how long our
notification and alert records are stored within our database.
And of course finally,
we can control our license for NetSupport Notify
and again, multiple licenses can be included within this.
It is worth noting, both in terms of operators
and subsequently when we talk about the agent configuration,
that NetSupport Notify can
integrate with your existing Active Directory infrastructure
and utilize user accounts and department structures straight from that.
Furthermore, when the product is installed,
we also provide you with a couple of example
AD templates
that you can use so that you can always ensure that all PCs automatically
apply to your company standard
without any additional
effort or input on your own part.
So let us just close our gateway configuration utility down for a second
and, as if by magic, we have our agent configurator.
And our agent
simply has here
details of our notification server's address,
where we have set security,
our key
and our confirmation of our security key,
the department of the PC that this agent is currently in - in this case the sales department -
and again,
if we were integrating with Active Directory our ADM template would automatically pick
up where that user was assigned and assign it accordingly;
and as our redundancy option,
the address of a second notification server
as backup should the primary server become unavailable.
It really is as simple as that.
So we have covered,
at a fairly quick pace, the main functionality within NetSupport Notify.
We have identified that you need the control software installed to send out
your messages,
we have a gateway in the centre which is our central point for handling
the delivery of those messages
and we have our agents that are installed on each PC we want to receive.
You may well not wish to visit every PC in your organization
to deliver the agent,
so as well as it being available as an MSI installer so that you can push it
out with your own
software distribution software,
NetSupport Notify also provides its own deploy utility,
allowing you to identify machines by a given IP address range
or, utilizing Windows networking,
it will browse and discover those PCs
and allow you to push out the agent automatically to those computers
with a minimum of effort.
Again, another handy feature
within NetSupport Notify.
Popping back to our notification console,
you will see it is a Windows application and it is sitting on the screen
in front of us now.
We also provide the notification console
as a web-based component
and when the console is installed,
an additional folder is installed on the computer
which contains the .asp pages and the supporting files needed
to have a web-based notification console.
This folder can be added to your web server
and then any member of staff accessing your
company intranet with the appropriate user permissions has the ability to send
quick alerts over the network
without the need for any locally installed console.
Again, the heart of NetSupport Notify
is simplicity
to ensure it can be used by everyone
(that is approved)
and messages can be sent as quickly as possible
and also flexibility in ensuring it can be used
in a number of different environments and again, with simplicity at heart.
Okay, well that wraps up our tour of NetSupport Notify and the configuration
options available for each of the key components.
As I hope you are aware, a free thirty-day evaluation copy of NetSupport Notify
is available for download from our website
www.netsupportnotify.com
and that can be used on up to fifty devices for you to fully evaluate
the functionality and capabilities of the product.
If you have any more specific questions or need additional advice, then please
contact one of our Account Managers
and we will be happy to deliver a one-to-one tailored webinar for you.
Thank you again for your time.