Getting ready for students
One of the major factors in purchasing LANDesk at CSU was to enable more freedom for our students. Currently a student who needs to install Microsoft Office will need to come in to one of the HUB's two walkup locations. This has been the common practice since we started ITP Choice in 2001. With LANDesk we hope to move out of this and enable students to install software on demand anywhere on campus.
A huge hurdle in this task is a disconnect between our student information system and LANDesk. Before an install begins we have to be sure that the person installing it is a currently enrolled, eligible student. We looked at several solutions for this including LANDesk Process Manager, but ultimately decided we could more efficiently do it with a simple authentication application.Requirements for student software installions:
- must be enrolled
- all fees paid
- only one machine per semester
The first itteration of the application was written in C# and really showed some promise. It would mostly authenticate, and record user information in LANDesk. I say mostly because people with certain url un-encode-able characters couldn't authenticate (more on this in a minute). It seemed we would need to use something that could use the post method. Since the scripting language we were using for c# was very simple and couldn't do this, we had to start looking for alternatives.
After looking into .net, java and some other languages we settled on Adobe's AIR. AIR gives us a platform independent base that we can use for students with Windows and Mac operating systems. It also has the ability to install itself if the computer running the application doesn't have it. It was that last feature that really sold me on it over .net. We still have Windows XP as our supported OS and it didn't come installed with the .net framework. Seems like a huge oversight by Microsoft, but whatever.
Chris Hansen churned our an AIR client in almost no time. It installs AIR if needed, it uses a post method, and has Mac support already. He came to me yesterday to test it and when I tried to logon, it failed. It was the same thing that was happening with our first client. Turns out it wasn't url encoding and the first application would have worked. There was a bug on the server side query that was freaking it out. After some modifications it is now in testing. We have deployed office 2k7, f-secure 8 and frontpage 2003 to a student machine, and tested eligible and ineligible accounts. By the end of the week I hope to be ready to test installations on multiple machines by a single user. We are getting very close to being able to push software to students.