Enterprises often have hundreds of conference rooms running Quicklaunch.  Each of these rooms often use the same settings, but each room usually has unique information, such as:

  • Room name
  • Exchange account and password
  • Calendar name
  • Skype for Business account and password
  • License key


To manually generate a unique settings file for each room is labor intensive.  The QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator reduces this effort by merging a "master" Quicklaunch settings file with a CSV file of unique information.


Warning

This is an advanced topic intended for Enterprise IT professionals.  It is expected that you know how to run commands from the command prompt., edit files, understand CSV.



How it Works

The QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator reads a "master" Quicklaunch settings file and creates one or more Quicklaunch settings files based on a CSV file you create.  Each of these generated settings files are unique to the room, but have all the common parameters for your enterprise.  The input CSV file contains room specific information such as room name, license, room account and room password.  The settings file  generator is smart enough to encrypt special fields such as email addresses and passwords.



Downloading the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator


Download the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator from  https://qlinstall.ucworkspace.com/utilities/QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator.zip


Copy it to a folder and unzip it.


Sample Files

The downloaded QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator zip file contains a sample CSV input file and also a sample settings file.


SampleSubstitutions.csv

SampleQuicklaunchSettingsFile.xml




Creating your Master Settings File

The "master" settings file is created in Quicklaunch.

  1. Install Quicklaunch on a computer
  2. Set up up your enterprise custom themes, domains, logo, action tiles etc.  
  3. Backup all settings to a QLS file  (Settings-> Export-> Backup all settings) to a QLS file
  4. This is your "master" settings file


Creating the CSV file containing Unique Information

The CSV file contains one line per room.  Each line contains information, such as the room name, license key, room account and room password.


  1. Create an empty CSV file with a text editor or a spreadsheet program.
  2. The file line in the file must contain the field names. common filed names are:
    1. RoomName
    2. RoomAccount
    3. RoomAccountCalendar
    4. RoomAccountPassword
    5. LicenseKey
  3. NOTE: at a minimum, this file *must* contain "RoomName", as this is used as the file name when creating each room settings file.
  4. NOTE: if the RoomAccount and the RoomAccountCalendar are the same, enter the same name in both fields.
  5. When entering userids or password they must be in cleartext.  The QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator will properly encrypt these fields when generating each settings file



Running the Quicklaunch Settings Generator

  1. Download and unzip the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator
  2. Open a command prompt, and set the current directory to where you unzipped the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator
  3. Create an empty directory for the output settings files
  4. Run the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator as follows (do not enter the braces)


QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator {master-settings-file-name}  {CSV-filename}  {output-directory-name}  (CLEAN)


where:


{master-settings-file-name}  - is the file path and name of the master settings file you created above

{CSV-filename}  - is the path and name of the CSV file you created above

{output-directory-name} - is the path of the empty output directory you created

CLEAN - an optional parameter.  If set will clean the output directory before running.


Advanced: Custom Editing


What about Google accounts?  This section is for you.


NOTE: this section is for advanced users.  You should understand and know how to use XML and XPath statements.


The fields in the QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator can be fully customized,  The file QuicklaunchSettingsGenerator.config.csv is a CSV file that contains the definitions of each field, its associated XPath statement to edit the settings file.

The CSV contains three fields:


FieldName - the name of the field as used in the CSV file above

XPath - the XML Xpath statment use to edit the settings file

IfEncrypted - either True or False, used to indicated if the field should be encrypted or not


The FieldName can be repeated.  For example, the field RoomAccount can be repeated multiple times to set the room account in multiple places (e.g. exchange, S4B, support email address)