Remedy AR System blog

This article is part of the ‘New in ARS 7.1′ series. 

One of the biggest changes for version 7.1 is the change in the License Enforcement System. For years BMC partners like us have raised issues with the licensing system. It was too slow, untrusting of the customer and purging licenses was just a direct disaster with license keys that had to match up and sometimes got lost. All in all very confusing for the partners and the customers alike.

So I was pretty interested to see what has changed in the new version and wow, I’m quite impressed. The new system provides a great deal of flexibility and gives the customer a freedom that was not seen before. Also for us consultants this makes life a lot easier. Instead of having to wait for a license before we can show a product to a customer now we can install it on an environment, get a license for it and show the customer without any waiting in between. This will greatly enhance our ability to give Demos and show the products.

So what has really changed in the system? For one the whole license key mess has been cleaned up. From now on you can say that you have a license, how many of it you have and press save. No pesky Start, Expiration Date or License keys that are case sensitive. Here’s a screenshot of an example server, click to enlarge:

As you can see only the AR Server license needs a key. In my case I have a temporary license which you can download from the BMC Support Website. All other licenses don’t need a key.

Of course what is important to remember is that only the license keys have disappeared, not the licenses themselves. That means that if you want to use 50 floating user licenses you will still have buy and pay maintenance for them.

There are two mechanisms that BMC can use to check on the license usage. One is an automated generation of a license use file. This is stored in the DB directory on the server. It records the number of licenses installed and the number of licenses in use. This file is updated about once every 45 minutes.

The other way is to generate a license report from the user tool. This reports takes a from- and to-date and will generate a summary of licenses used in the specified period. Below a screenshot of this report in Excel. Of note is that I appear to have used 3 fixed Incident Management licenses where none are defined. That should not really be possible I assume.

I don’t know how BMC wants to check the license usage at their customers. As far as I know there are no requirements currently in place that a customers sends a license report each year to BMC, but of course this can change. Also third-party developers that are dependant on BMC for licensed applications might not be altogether happy with this step. Then again I don’t know any company that uses the Licensed option for their application except BMC.

Conclusion

This is a real step forwards for BMC in regards to licensing. I’m really happy that they decided to make it easier for partners to implement products and show demonstrations. I will be interested to see how this plays out ‘in the field’ and how licenses will be implemented by the customer. At least it will save a lot of people a lot of headaches when installing ITSM7 on a customer site.

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This article is part of the ‘New in ARS 7.1′ series. 

Part of the new functionality in ARS 7.1 is to allow Users to change their own password. The way BMC has implemented this with the use of a new Form called ‘User Password Change’, permissions are set to Public and an Entry Point is enabled so it will show up on the application list on the Home Page. On systems with LDAP authentication this will manually have to be disabled, on Mixed Authentication systems some other small check might have to made if a user can change his or her password.

On the form the old password has to be entered, followed by a new password and a confirmation of that new password. It all looks pretty straight-forward for the enduser which is of course always good. After a click on the save button the password is saved, and the user can continue working without having to log out and in again. That is great news, and a big improvement over home-made change password tools.

The password change works on a v7.0 User Tool as well, with the exception that the User has to log in again.

 (Screenshot of Change Password functionality, click for full size)

Configuration

On the AR System Administration Console there is a new option to change the Configuration of the Password Change. This seems to work in several mysterious ways, including crashing the user tool when saving the record for the first time and not having a save button where you would expect one. However multiple options are available including expiration, warning and disable windows for passwords. There are some standard rules enforced, which can be disabled. There is another option to add other checks in the new password as well.

Conclusion 

Overal it looks feature complete, and the standard rules should satisfy the Security Department rules of most companies. Of course in a lot of cases authentication will go through LDAP, making this new functionality one more thing that has to be disabled on a new installation. It is certainly a big improvement over having to write your own functionality in previous versions.

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After celebrating that 7.1 was released (ok, not really) I spent a few hours installing it with several other components today. I decided to do a typical upgrade of ITSM7, not a fresh install. I have not looked at the compatibility matrix yet but suppose ARS 7.1 should really work with ITSM 7.0.2.

I installed 7.1 on the following machine:

• Hardware:VMWare
• OS: Windows 2003 Server
• DB: MS-SQL 2000
• Webserver: IIS 6
• Java 1.5 Update 12

Remedy products installed:

• ARS 7.0.1 patch 3
• ITSM 7.02 patch 4, including: IM, PM, CM, SLM, SRM, KM

I installed using the mininum options, only adding Webservices to the mix.

All new versions installed:

• ARS 7.1
• Midtier 7.1
• Approval Engine 7.1
• Assignment Engine 7.1
• User Tool 7.1
• Admin Tool 7.1

Installation of AR Server 7.1

As mentioned above, the Server install was an upgrade from 7.0.1 p3, the installer did not give any error messages, but the error log showed some index violations (makes sense, the data was already there) and mentioned that Sample data was not requested (it was).

There are no new options at all in the 7.1 installation as compared to the 7.0 installation, so there is not much to review except to say that the English Windows installations always seem to work out just fine. As I have noticed with several customers once you start throwing in other languages, Unix and perhaps on Oracle DB things tend to mud up a bit. I’m really looking forward testing this install on Solaris with an Oracle DB and throw in a few umlauts.

 Installation of ARS 7.1 User Tool

Went without any problems, logged in and saw the new Change Password functionality, which I will review later.

Installation of ARS 7.1 Admin Tool

The new Admin tool did not install on my VMWare, which already was an upgrade from 6.3. It did install nicely on my normal Windows XP Professional machine, so I guess it is a one-off failure. It all looks good, but of course there are the features that got moved to the User Tool. I’ll review them later.

Assignment / Approval Engines.

These proved to be horribly boring to install, however both wanted a reboot after the install.

Midtier 7.1 Installation

I uninstalled 7.0 midtier and the Atlanta ServletExec. Installation was smooth and painless, with the BMC installer suggesting I install Tomcat. Also the IIS redirector was automatically installed.

Conclusion

As with version 7.0, installing ARS on a Windows platform is quite easy. No new features were introduced that needed additional installation, and  an upgrade from 7.0 was easily achieved. I’m looking forward to giving the new functionality a spin and having a look at the new Java API.

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Version 7.1 is released, right on schedule.

I hope I will have time to have a first look at it this weekend.

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On the BMC Developer Network there is an article detailing the new functionality in ARS 7.1, which should arrive early September. (The unofficial date is ready for download at 31 August, but that is today and I have not seen anything yet).

Most interesting for Java developers like me will be the Java plugin server. I’m hoping it has the same capabilities as the ‘old’ C plugin server. Since java plugin server can run C plugins as well I assume that is the case.

BMCDN : What’s New in BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.1.00

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Hi all, and welcome to the AR System blog at xqsr.com. I started this site to let myself keep up with news that is happening around the Remedy AR System and the new version (7.1) that should be out these days.

I hope to post my findings and tips about the new version here, but since I don’t know how much time I will have in the near future it’s probably best to subscribe in your favorite feedreader.

Please note that this site is not affiliated in any way with BMC. All trademarks belong to their rightful owner.

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