Screen OCR Used To Integrate Tyler's Munis ERP and Laserfiche

Who says good old fashion screen OCR is dead? Certainly not Tyler Munis ERP and 
Laserfiche users. Ratchet-X is helping them love it.

Check out the integration in this new video.

Ratchet-X Used To Integrate Tyler ERP and Laserfiche

Need to integrate Tyler ERP and Laserfiche's ECM? Ratchet-X has got you covered. Check out this press release from Laserfiche.

RatchetSoft Wins 2012 Coder Royale

Just in case you missed it, RatchetSoft was selected as the winner of the 2012 ICUC Coder Royale Contest. Our Ratchet-X-based click-to-call solution enables users to initiate calls placed through inContact's cloud-based call center infrastructure from any application without requiring changes to those applications. Click here to see the winning entry video.

Special thanks to George Weihs and the development team that worked on this project. Congratulations!

Technique: Integrating Applications On A Remote Desktop

In most cases, Ratchet-X works fine when used to integrate applications that are running on a remote desktop like Citrix's XenApp, VMWare's ThinApp or Microsoft's App-V. In these cases, it’s common to deploy Ratchet-X itself on that remote desktop along with the target application to be integrated. To the end user, he would never even know that either application is deployed remotely. The Ratchet-X Commander icon still appears in its usual spot in his windows system tray. Interacting with it seems to be the exact same experience as if it were installed locally. However, it’s important to remember that Ratchet-X is deployed remotely and only has access to other apps running on the same remote desktop. Applications running natively on the actual desktop cannot be accessed by the remotely deployed Ratchet-X Commander or visa versa. Or can they?

We’ve been using a technique that allows us to bridge this gap. For example, imagine there's a line of business application that is deployed as a Citrix XenApp. We want to place a magic button on that XenApp when the user navigates the application into a certain state (e.g. Invoice Summary Window). We define a RegWin for that window and save it into an appspace that we register with Ratchet-X running on the remote desktop. That method handles the screen recognition and appearance of magic button. When the magic button is clicked, Ratchet-X runs the action on the remote desktop that needs to (somehow), load an application on the actual workstation and do some navigation (we call this the Jump2 pattern). Now this is  where the problem lies. Although we currently we have no direct way to communicate between these two desktops (though we'll soon have an elegant solution that universally addresses this problem across all remoting desktop solutions without being vendor specific), we do have a pretty clever integration technique that can be used as a stand in. The technique involves the passing of this data from the remote desktop to the local desktop using a built-in feature of our Action API.  

When called, the method WaitForScreenDataTransfer, found on the ActionContext object, loads a window on the desktop which displays text data you pass it. This window loads offscreen (not visible) or center screen (visible), and simply waits until the user closes it (click window close button). This proves to be an effective way to transfer some limited data (up to 4K), from the remote desktop to the actual windows desktop. It works because the remoting software (XenApp, etc..) faithfully copies the titlebar text over to its virtual window running on the local desktop. Now this window titlebar text data can be seen from Ratchet-X running on the local desktop. We simply need a RegWin on the local desktop's Ratchet-X which we can register as an "Auto-Run" and associate it with a local action. That local action simply reads the titlebar text from the RegWin that auto-ran and goes about its business as usual - accessing any resources it needs on the local desktop.  

To summarize, here are the high points of this integration:

From the User’s Perspective	Behind the Scenes
User loads his accounting application and navigates to the Invoice Summary window and the magic button displays on the titlebar.	Ratchet-X, running on the remote machine detects a known RegWin and displays the magic button.
User clicks the magic button.	Ratchet-X running on the remote machine starts to run an action on the remote desktop which calls WaitForScreenDataTransfer and passes in an invoice number. This displays a window (virtualized and available on the local desktop but not visually seen because its loaded off-screen. Then, Ratchet-X running on the local machine detects the ScreenDataTransfer RegWin and auto-runs another action on the local desktop. That action reads the invoice number from the ScreenDataTransfer RegWin and loads a local document management executable to display the appropriate document on the user's local desktop.
User sees invoice document appear.

If you want to try this yourself, take a look at a sample appspace that ships with Ratchet-X demonstrating this technique. In Sample Appspaces, register the RatchetX.ScreenDataTransfer appspace. This appspace contains a RegWin that matches the window created by the ScreenDataTransfer window. In the field, you’ll need to make your own RegWin that matches the window as displayed by your remoting provider.

Introducing the Ratchet-X Package Editor

Most Ratchet-X installations are pretty straightforward. You create your assets and then place them in a centralized location (network file share or web server), to which all users have access. However, for large enterprise installations with multiple user constituencies, or Ratchet-X Distributors who want to give their customers a customized installation package that contains all configured assets along with specific branding components, deployment has always required a little more work. The good news is that we've just removed most of that work with the release of the Ratchet-X Package Editor. The Ratchet-X Package Editor allows you to easily create custom installation packages that contain all the assets, specific Ratchet-X version and white labeled branding elements in one simple MSI installation package. No specific knowledge of how to create or manage MSI files is necessary to work with the Package Editor. Just gather your assets, configure a few parameters, click a button and your custom Ratchet-X installation package is created for you. Sweet! Check out our web site for more details.

Ratchet-X and conflicts with keyboard shortcut applications

Ratchet-X is highly unintrusive in terms of its impact at the desktop. However, there are instances when it may conflict with other applications (usually utilities), that work with the keyboard buffer. An example of such an application is PhraseExpress from Bartels Media GmbH. This very useful utility allows the user to create global keyboard shortcuts that when typed, are replaced with a larger phrase thus reducing typing and ensuring textual consistency. In order to do this, the application must monitor what the user is typing into every application at the desktop, perform a recognition, eat the shortcut keystrokes when entered and replace it with the mapped long form text from its database. While this would not normally cause a conflict with Ratchet-X, if your action makes heavy use of stuffing keys in the keyboard buffer or your regwin hosts a conflicting keyboard shortcut, a conflict may arise. If an action does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to do or is exhibiting odd behavior and your action or regwin uses the keyboard buffer or shortcuts, check to see if the user is running a utility that intercepts keystrokes. This might save you some action debugging time.

Ratchet-X Jump2 - Jump Anywhere

Have you heard about Ratchet-X Jump2? Ratchet-X Jump2 is a new, low-cost offering from RatchetSoft that allows you to add simple, yet critically important and pervasively needed features to your existing applications. Ratchet-X Jump2 allows you to extend the context of the entity you are working within an application by enabling you to jump” to the same context in another application. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a customer record in your CRM system and you want to see all the related documents for the same customer in your document management system. Ratchet-X Jump2 allows you to add that functionality quickly, easily and at a fraction of the price it would cost to enable this feature using the full-featured version of Ratchet-X.

To learn more about Ratchet-X Jump2, which was recently announced at the annual AIIM conference, click here.

Ratchet-X Version 5 Released. And There Was Much Rejoicing!

Drum roll please......After 9 long months of development and testing, we're proud to announce the official release of Ratchet-X, Version 5. While our existing customers have been banging on some of these new features for a while, this is the first time we've been able to roll out all these improvements in one major release. And we're quite excited about it!

Besides a plethora of new features, we've streamlined the code in a major way. By stripping out tens of thousands of lines of code and depreciating infrequently used features, we were able to improve runtime performance and focus our precious resources on the features our users say they love most. Needless to say, our developers are happy and take great joy in telling Marketing how wrong they were in pushing for some of these "must have" deprecated features.

For more information on the release, check out our new web site at www.ratchetsoft.com. Better yet, if you want to see the product in action, download it today at http://ratchetsoft.com/html/downloadform.html.

Thanks again, and as always, please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of the product.

See you at IASA

Sunday marks the start of the IASA National Educational Conference and RatchetSoft is proud to be a sponsor of this year's show. Come see us at booth #609 and get a demo of the latest and greatest in desktop application integration. We'll be showing a series of new integrations and automations along with some old favorites.

Also, don't forget to ask us about the new and exciting RatchetSoft releases due out this fall.

Looking forward to seeing you in Grapevine, TX.

How Does A Ratchet Work?

One of the downsides of working for a company named RatchetSoft is the inordinate amount of click-throughs we get on our website for the search phrase; “How does a ratchet work”. I realize it’s because we have a page on the site entitled; “How Does Ratchet-X Work?”, but I’m still amazed at the number of people that pose the question, and based on the search snippet returned, still think it’s relevant and click through. It’s kind of funny.