Orchestrator Remote Tools 2.0 - fka The Opalis UI Generator

Note : This tool is now at v2.51 : See https://blogs.technet.com/b/yasc/archive/2011/12/13/orchestrator-remote-tools-2-5.aspx

The "Orchestrator Remote Tools" are the follow up to my "Opalis UI Generator" from Opalis, but with many enhancements :-)

These tools provide a way to launch Orchestrator runbooks remotely from a UI or a command-line, and complement other out of the box capabilities like Web Service calls. They also provide optional parameter validation as well (for example, you might want to make sure that someone sends “Yes” or “No” for a specific parameter, or provides a parameters that starts with “VM*”).

The Orchestrator Remote Tools provide 3 components:

 - The UI Generator lets an Orchestrator administrator browse graphically through all runbooks with an “Initialize Data” start activity, pick one of them, configure parameters and generate a XML template

 - The Remote Runbook Launcher is a generic executable that will use that XML template as long as it sits in the same directory. This executable adapts its UI to the XML file and makes sure that parameter validation is correct.

 - The Remote Runbook Launcher CLI does the same job, but from a command line.

  
  
The remote launch itself is done using a web service call to the new Orchestrator Web Service. This will run under the user’s credentials, and a “Run As” launch would also be possible to leverage other credentials.

A scenario to use these could be as a System Center Operations Manager delegated task for example.

The download is available from CodePlex : https://orchestrator.codeplex.com/releases/view/76983

New features in v2.0:

 - New! Support for Orchestrator 2012. This was tested with the RC release. Note : If you need to use this tool with Opalis Integration Server 6.3, you need to use version 1.1

 - New! The Runbook launcher now has a CLI-mode as well

 - New! Parameter validation in the tool. You can set if parameters should be string, integer, Booleans and assign patterns to be used in the Runbook Launchers (GUI or CLI)

 - The Remote Runbook Launcher UI actually uses the expected controls, like a checkbox for Booleans or a listbox for a list of values

 - The UI Generator now inherits the runbook description from the Runbook designer

 - Since this is now leveraging the brand new web service, there is no need to pass credentials at runtime. Launching the application using RunAs is also possible if you need to launch it with a different user context

 - The “Create Web Page” feature has been temporarily removed from the tool