Hey everyone, just a heads up, not sure if there is a better way to do this but in our testing it has worked well for us.

The primary goal of this project was to be able to launch MSRA requests from our helpdesk tickets if someone selects that they wanted to receive one. So how were we to do this for staff which only use the helpdesk portal and dont have access to inventory cards? Well its a little tricky.

Requirements:

Group policy set up on the machine to allow RA group configurations for access to the machine.

Added a field to the ticket called Remote Assistance? With Yes, No, Request Sent as values and No as default.

Custom Ticket rule which detects the tickets that require a link to be created. Also sets field value to Request Sent

Configuration of Rule:

Ticket rule configured to act on save for tickets with particular machine name beginning (in our environment) and only if not closed and request is 'yes'. This was done via the wizard. Wizard also used to set field value to 'Request Sent' after processing.

In configuration added the following on one line as a comment for every detected ticket:

<ahref="javascript:LaunchMSRA()">Launch Remote Assistance</a><script>function LaunchMSRA(){if(!document.all){   alert ("Available only with Internet Explorer.");   return;}var ws =newActiveXObject("WScript.Shell"); var Mach=prompt("What is the machine name?","");ws.Exec("C:\\Windows\\System32\msra.exe /offerRA " + Mach);}</script>

 What the above does is create a comment on the ticket with a hyperlink 'Launch Remote Assistance', it uses a javascript in order to run the executable with a prompt for the machine name to connect to. This uses msra but I'm certain that you could do this with vnc etc, in fact, if you were funky enough you could probably pull the machine name automatically also.

Have only tested this in IE. Also another caveat is that once this function is created due to the way that it is embedded in the ticket contents you cannot edit it, ie, if you make changes to the script and re-call it with the same name you will still get the first one because of the read order I'm guessing. My thoughts there was to create the function dynamically with a name that was based of the time to now in seconds.

Havent moved this to production yet but its looking promising. There are all sorts of things that you could use this sort of scripting from within comment banks with. I dont imagine its something that KACE would support though....

Any thoughts or comments I'd be glad to hear them.

Cheers,

Col