Tracker Accross the entire Network

[Dave Gold]

Hi I've been a Vacker user for many years. I have a question that can help me a lot in my work.

Is it possible to track my workers computers via network without having to worry about them shutting it off by mistake (and my billing gets lost)?

If yes, can I set different pricing for each computer station?
We have different charging rates for beginners and for experience workers.

Also is it possible to get the report as an MS Excel file?

Thanks,
Dave G.

[Alex]

Dear Dave,

The answer to your question would be both yes and no. If I understand your requirements correctly, then VAKCER Project Tracker can't do what you need out of othe box. However there are a few things that can be done to make it suit you better.

First, VPT is configured by default to start with Windows and load last used project without asking any questions. So, unless the user goes in and intentionally close the project and/or application, there shouldn't be a problem with accidentally stopping it. If the user deliberately want to close the program, there is a special "stealth" mode in VPT which will make the application run without showing any windows or taskbar icons. However the user still can kill the process using Windows Task Manager, so it is not fool proof.

Now about network administration. I guess you want to download the recorded data from users' machines remotely from your computer. Right now there is no such feature. You need to be present at the user's machine to save the project data (or use the Network plugin to transfer your data to a central computer from workstation, but again, you need to be at the users machine). However, as you might know, VPT exposes a COM automation object model which can be used to control the application from another programs. This can also be done remotely using DCOM implemented in all recent Windows platforms.

So, it is quite easy to develop a custom application using Visual Basic or any other programming language that will run on your machine and poll each user's VPT and instruct it to save the project data to a particular place on the network where it can be picked up, merged into single project and analyzed.

It is also possible to create a plug-in/custom application to extract project data and save it in whatever format, including Excel (for example, see this simple plug-in illustrating connectivity between VPT and MS Excel.

In other words, there are no native features in the application right now which allows you to do what you ask for, however it has open and extensible architecture which allows third parties to add custom features to the program.

I hope this sheds some light on your problem. Please let me know if I can be of any more assistance.
_________________
Admin

[davegold]

Hi Alex,

Sorry for the delay in giving you feedback, I was all tied up, and it took me some time to try something new.

As always you are the best, the Excel feature saves me a lot of time, not having to print every report from every system every day... Now I just click and save the file for my billing (which is done in Excel anyhow).

The network stuff sounds too difficult for me, I'm not that good of a software programer, so I'll just skip that one for now.

The other thing you mentioned about having it run on stealth mode. How can I set that? I can see that on some systems it runs in hiding while on others it does not, how can I set that on all the systems?

Thanks again for your help.
Dave G.

P.S. I just recomended this software to a few more people.