Greetings From Municipal Gov in Canada

[mark.williamson]

Hi There,

I'm an employee with the Regional Municipality of York in Ontario Canada.
I stumbled upon Rainmeter one day and started playing around with it. I am very tech savvy as I'm primarily a software developer. I started creating my own RSS feeds from our internal software applications and threw them on my desktop using Rainmeter and thought .. WOW, this tool can be used as a fully custom dashboard for our users and managers.

Are there any other government entities out there using Rainmeter ? Or even business using it as a custom dashboard implementation ?

Thanks guys, and I'm glad to have joined the forum.

Mark Williamson

[jsmorley]

Hi There,

I'm an employee with the Regional Municipality of York in Ontario Canada.
I stumbled upon Rainmeter one day and started playing around with it. I am very tech savvy as I'm primarily a software developer. I started creating my own RSS feeds from our internal software applications and threw them on my desktop using Rainmeter and thought .. WOW, this tool can be used as a fully custom dashboard for our users and managers.

Are there any other government entities out there using Rainmeter ? Or even business using it as a custom dashboard implementation ?

Thanks guys, and I'm glad to have joined the forum.

Mark Williamson

I don't know of any specific entities using it in a business or government environment, but as long as you understand that it doesn't offer much in the way of security and are careful what you do with it and who has access to it, I see no reason why it couldn't be used for a lot of different purposes like that.

[mark.williamson]

I don't know of any specific entities using it in a business or government environment, but as long as you understand that it doesn't offer much in the way of security and are careful what you do with it and who has access to it, I see no reason why it couldn't be used for a lot of different purposes like that.

I'm not too worried about security. We have security built on our entire domain and are behind a firewall. Also by default all of our applications are behind authentication protocols so in order to display information on desktops through Rainmeter, we would have to manually open up data one at a time. It's at THAT time where we will have to be careful.

Cheers

[jsmorley]

I'm not too worried about security. We have security built on our entire domain and are behind a firewall. Also by default all of our applications are behind authentication protocols so in order to display information on desktops through Rainmeter, we would have to manually open up data one at a time. It's at THAT time where we will have to be careful.

Cheers

It's important to understand that WebParser, the Rainmeter plugin that would drive most of what you are likely to be doing, has no ability to do any authentication at all except for using a GET where you put a login id and password on the URL like "http://MyName:MyPass@SomeSite.com/SomeHTMLorPHP" so what you are probably going to want to look at is having servers/applications you want to monitor output some text file or html file that you can then lock down with .htaccess while allowing the PC running Rainmeter to get at them with http:// or ftp:// or even file:// (if you can set the output folder to SERVER\\SomeFolder\SomeFile and get at it with a PC.)

[mark.williamson]

It's important to understand that WebParser, the Rainmeter plugin that would drive most of what you are likely to be doing, has no ability to do any authentication at all except for using a GET where you put a login id and password on the URL like "http://MyName:MyPass@SomeSite.com/SomeHTMLorPHP" so what you are probably going to want to look at is having servers/applications you want to monitor output some text file or html file that you can then lock down with .htaccess while allowing the PC running Rainmeter to get at them with http:// or ftp:// or even file:// (if you can set the output folder to SERVER\\SomeFolder\SomeFile and get at it with a PC.)

Yes we would have to take measures to lock stuff down no problem.
Our systems are only accessible internally anyway so authentication is not always needed. Yes my idea is for systems to write to flat files on our network and have Rainmeter read the files. Certain data that HAS to remain confidential will NOT be included in the future dashboards.

[jsmorley]

Sounds like a plan. Have fun.