All workstations or devices that will be shown in the Applixure service require an agent installation ("Applixure Agent" or "Agent"), without which we are unable to display any information regarding that device or its associated software. To receive complete view of your workstation environment, make sure that agent has been installed to all of your PCs.
You can easily add new Agents to your environment by following the instructions below. At the end of this article there's also detailed installation instructions for different software deployment scenarios available.
1. Prerequisites
Operating system prerequisites
Agent requires a minimum of Windows 7 (SP1) operating system to function.
A full edition of Microsoft Windows is required, Applixure does not support Windows RT or Embedded versions running in Windows Phones at this time.
Note that Microsoft Surface Pro 1, Surface Pro 2 and Surface 3 (all versions) and Surface 4 tablet devices are supported, as do most other manufacturers' Windows-based tablets and hybrid devices, as they run full edition of Windows.
Microsoft .NET prerequisites
For Windows devices, Agent requires Microsoft .NET Framework run-time to be present or installed on the Windows machine before it can function.
The minimum .NET Framework runtime version required by Applixure is .NET 2.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2), but will work with any newer runtime present in the computer such as .NET 4.0 that is installed by default on Windows 8 or newer.
For Microsoft Windows version starting from Windows 7 (and newer) there are no extra steps required to make Agent work with your machine.
Networking / firewall prerequisites
To operate correctly and for the service to receive data, Agent requires computers to have a continuously or frequently available Internet–connection.
For all communication, Agent uses standard HTTPS (TCP port 443) outbound connection and should not in normal circumstances require any explicit firewall configurations.
Should your computers, or network in-between Agents and public Internet, have outbound connection restrictions regarding HTTPS connections, please make sure that the devices where Agents has been installed are allowed to open HTTPS traffic to *.applixure.com addresses.
Please note, that any Man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxying of connections that intercepts Agent's HTTPS traffic in-between the devices and the Applixure service may prevent Agent from communicating with our service.
If you need to use explicit proxy setting for all outbound HTTPS traffic, please see our article on distributing proxy settings for Applixure Agent.
2. Installation
Acquiring Agent
You can download Agent installation packages for your environment from the Applixure UI, from the Agents -tab:
You have choice of downloading either unified Agent installer (Interactive setup, .EXE based) or separate automatically deployable installers for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions (Windows Installer, MSI, -based option).
Please select the installer, or installers, that matches the operating system you have on your computers (32-bit or 64-bit).
When downloaded, Applixure Agent's installer will be named according to:
ApplixureAgent-EnvironmentName.exe - for unified installer
ApplixureAgent-EnvironmentName-bitness.msi - for MSI based installer
What version of installer should I use?
If you are unsure which bitness version of Windows you have, unified installer can be used for both as it will automatically select correct version. This installer type will need user interaction upon installation as is not suitable for automatic mass-deployment.
If you need to do automatic, or unattended, mass-deployment of Applixure Agent using software deployment tool, such as AD, SCCM or other system management tool, please use the MSI version of the installer.
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Please note The agent downloaded from the Applixure UI is already prepared (pre-configured) for the environment from which they were downloaded, and as such do not need any parameterization upon deployment. This means that installation packages cannot be shared between different Applixure environments. |
Installation packages using Windows Installer technology do not require any parameters, transforms or user interaction to be used. Unified installer also does not require any parameters, but require user interaction to complete the installation.
For detailed installation instructions, please refer to the section below which applies to your workstation environment. If you are unsure, manual installation method is always the most guaranteed method to work.
After successful installation, and for subsequent agent updates, Applixure takes care of keeping the Agent up-to-date automatically and you do not need to roll out updates to the agent using the installer package once the initial deployment is completed.
It is recommended that you re-download the installation package from time to time, if you intend to roll-out Agents over longer period of time or as a continuous function when deploying new devices to the environment. While Agent eventually updates itself to the latest version after installation, the installer package is re-generated automatically whenever new Agent versions are released. By re-downloading the installer and updating it into your deployment solution you can make sure that newly deployment devices already have the latest fixes and features contained within.
Installation using software deployment (ESD) systems (e.g. Microsoft SCCM)
You can add provided MSI package as-is to your software deployment system, only making sure that the computers receive the correct version of the agent software (32-bit vs. 64-bit). MSI package will refuse install into Windows that does not match the bitness of the package.
Due to nature of Agent, installation needs to be performed under administrative user rights.
Installation using scripting (e.g. AD logon scripts)
If you want to install the agents using scripting, use the Windows Installer runtime to execute the installation package in the following manner:
msiexec /i "path_to\ApplixureAgent-MyEnv-32bit.msi" /qn
(Please replace the path to the install package according your network location holding the installation files)
Due to nature of agent, installation needs to be performed under administrative user rights and as such, the script needs to be executed with elevated privileges.
Manual Installation
It is always possible to install Agent individually on each target computer. For this method, preferred version of the installation package is unified installer (.EXE based).
To do so, follow the step-by-step guide below:
- After downloading the installation files from above links, copy the installation packages into removable media (such as USB stick or CD/DVD disc) or to a network share which is accessible from the computer(s) that will receive the agent.
- On the target computer, log on using administrative credentials or user account with privileges to install software.
- Open the shared network drive or insert the removable media to the machine, containing the Agent installation package.
- Locate and execute the appropriate installation package by double-clicking on the installer .EXE file in the folder.
- If the user account has sufficient privileges on the computer, you do not need to interact with the installer and the installation proceeds automatically. In other cases Windows may prompt you for another account that has administrative rights on the computer.
- After installation, rebooting the computer is not necessary but some of the features will start working only after the currently logged on users has re-logged on to the device again.
Terminal Servers, RDSH Servers and Citrix
If you intend to run Applixure Agent on Windows Server that serves multiple interactive users (Terminal Services, or Remote Desktop Session Host) either with Microsoft's built-in functionality or with 3rd part extensions such as Citrix XenApp, please refer to additional instructions for configuring Agent in such scenarios.
Please note that these additional instructions do not apply to any other server types.
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