Master Automation with the Automox Worklet™ Development Kit!

Have you ever wished a message window would pop up and ask your team members if you could update a piece of software before you dive into said update? How about performing a quick network scan to identify if any devices on your network expose a particular network port? Or perhaps you'd just like a simple way of programmatically interacting with data on your devices, such as installed software.

Enter the Automox Worklet Development Kit (affectionately WDK).

The WDK is, at the most fundamental level, a tool to efficiently produce capable Worklets while requiring much less code.

To understand the value WDK offers, it's important to first make sense of the automation demands of modern business, the plight of today’s System Administrator (SysAdmin), and get a clear mental picture of what problem-solving might look like without WDK.

So, put on your imagination cap…

Imagine you’re a SysAdmin at a financial institution that maintains 800 endpoints (desktop PCs and laptops). And say you’ve been tasked with automating the update process for the company’s phone system software. Let’s say this software runs on 750 of those 800 devices. 

“Easy enough!” you say as you produce a simple Automox Worklet to update the software. Of course, all is well… until you discover that when the software updates it sometimes disconnects team members during active phone calls. Yikes!

After a predictably pleasant call with your management team (NOT), you’re determined to prevent this from happening ever again. The easiest way would be to display a message box on your team members' screens to get consent before the update is performed. However, this is where the train leaves the tracks. As simple as this solution seems at the surface, to accomplish this requires about 1,000 lines of complex code! 

This barrier alone would likely bring this project to a halt, or worse, result in you investing a lot of time (and maybe even a few late nights) to develop the solution. 

So, let's assume you’ve done the math for this use-case and the value of the update is much greater than the effort you’d have to put in. Now, what if you'd like to use that same code in multiple Worklets? You can just copy it, of course! Donezo. But then, you discover a bug in your original code! (Don’t stress, it’s just a hypothetical.) Clearly, now you need to hunt down everywhere you’ve copied this code and manually update it. Argh.

As time progresses, this problem grows exponentially into a living nightmare. Most notable nightmares include:

• The pendulum of value derived from your time spent on this problem is swinging further and further out of favor.

• There’s a significant risk in relying solely on you to possess the critical business IT understanding required to address all the company's needs.

• Your code is beginning to drift. It’s increasingly difficult to manage, debug, and update.

The Automox WDK aims to help with all of the above nightmare scenarios. 

With WDK, the extensive lines of code we previously theorized can be condensed into a few lines that are easily comprehensible (for newbie SysAdmins and experts alike).

powershell

# check if a user is active

if ( Test-UserActive )

{

# if a user is active, ask them if we can update our software

# we'll wait 300 seconds / 5-minutes before we call it and proceed anyway

$response = Send-ActiveUserMessage -Title "System Updates Available" -Message "An update is available for you software phone system. Proceed?" -DialogType "YesNo" -Timeout 300

# check if our user hit "YES" or a timeout was reached

if ( $response -in "YES", "TIMEOUT" )

{

     # perform your update here!

}

}

* See the Test-UserActive and Send-ActiveUserMessage docs to learn more about the WDK functions referenced above!