Auvis: One way messages receiver for network-wide alerts

Easier Deployment and Administering with new Vypress Auvis 2.0

Although Vypress Auvis 2.0 comes with many important new features (such us the ability to receive files from Vypress Messenger 3.0 and an improved user interface), most changes in Auvis 2.0 were developed to make deployment and administration of Auvis easier than ever while lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of our product. This Web page highlights a few of the changes we made to achieve this important goal.

New Setup Wizard

Auvis 2.0 comes with a greatly improved Setup Wizard. Although there are many small interface enhancements and increased intelligence in the new Setup Wizard, the major new feature is the customization of the Auvis installation process. Easy to follow step-by-step procedures describe how to customize Auvis’ installation for your organization’s needs:

1. Extract files to disk. Auvis’ setup package (Auvis20.exe) is a self-extracting archive; all files from the archive can be easily extracted into a selected folder. To extract files you can use the EXTRACT.EXE command, third-party utilities such as WinRAR or just run the setup package with a “/C” command-line switch such as the following:

   Auvis20.exe /C /T:"Z:\\Server\User Files\Auvis Setup\"
2. Customize the installation. Most aspects of the installation process can be customized by editing the INSTALL.INF file (a plain text INI file). For example:
   • You can customize the name of Auvis’ subfolder in the C:\Program Files folder by editing the value DefaultSubdir in the [install] section.
   • You can disable uninstall of Auvis through the “Add/Remove Programs” Control Panel applet in Windows 2000 by changing the value “1” to the value “NoRemove” in the [uninstall] section.
   • You can customize the list of files to install by editing filenames in the Program Files section. For example, you can remove all text files from this section or add the license KEY file to the default installation (this is very useful with the new easy licensing by a single KEY file   see below).
3. Customize the folder content. If you removed or added files from/to the installation script (as described in 2c) then you can remove/add corresponding files from/to the setup folder. You must not remove any files that are required for installation and were not declared in the [Program Files] section of the INSTALL.INF file.
4. Customize the initial registry settings. Auvis’ appearance is controlled by special registry values and you can easily customize these initial registry settings. The new Setup Wizard takes its initial values from the file INIT.REG. It is just a plain registry export file and you can either customize the existing file or make a new one by exporting the appropriate values from the registry. This feature is useful in conjunction with the new multi-level registry settings support (see below).

5. Run unattended setup. Finally, you can run the setup process silently on client computers by launching the SETUP.EXE file with the /SILENT command line. For example:

   Z:\\Server\User Files\Auvis Setup\Setup.exe /silent

   See this case-studio for a more complex example that includes detection of existing installations.

Simplified License Management

Vypress Auvis 2.0 also includes a new licensing scheme similar to the new licensing found in Vypress Messenger 3.0. Now, Vypress Auvis 2.0 requires only one KEY file for an entire network. This license key file can be copied on every workstation or it can be used exclusively from a shared read-only location. These measures dramatically simplify license management when compared to previous versions of Auvis (where each computer required an individual KEY-file or a shared location with write access rights).

Multi-level Registry Support

Previous versions of Vypress Auvis read settings exclusively from the current users registry hive (HKEY_CURRENT_USER). To simplify registry settings management and improve flexibility of program configuration, we introduced multi-level registry settings in version 2.0. Now Vypress Auvis first loads machine-dependent settings from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, then it loads current users settings (from HKEY_CURRENT_USER, if it exists), then the override global computer setting with individual user settings and, at last, it loads current users policy registry settings from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies key. This makes it easier to manage multi-user computers (no longer is there a requirement to customize each user on each computer) and restrict access to partial registry settings in Windows NT/2000/XP (where you can deny access to a specified registry key or keys).