Additional NI Software Idea Exchange

Hello,

It would be nice to add a tool like RAD (NI Replication And Deployement utility) directly into MAX.

But a RAD compatible with all Targets LabVIEW Runtimes.

... a kind ok target cloner, saver , restorer ... 

Manu.

To be specific, I am talking about the link below from the 3.x NI License Manager (this is on a VM I use for LV 8.5 development)

It had the nice feature of filling in your computer's information and all the products you are activating as part of the link.  Unfortunately, NI's website no longer supports this pre-filling - using this link in 3.x now just redirects you to the normal result of typing in ni.com/activate into your browser.

My typical workflow with this screen would be to enter my real serial number into the preceding dialog, use this dialog to get the activation link, go back to the preceding dialog and enter in a fake serial number, press next twice to get the activation codes entry dialog, and copy the activation codes into the dialog.

In NI License Manager 4.x, you either need to use web activation (which saves your serial number everywhere) or enter codes manually, requiring a trip to http://ni.com/activate for every product that needs activation (and trying to figure out how the name of an application in License Manager - say "Vision Development Module Runtime" - matches against the website's entries - say "Vision Development Module", "Vision Development Module (FRC)", "Vision Development Module Runtime (FRC)", and "Vision Runtime") and a bunch of e-mail spam if you choose to get a copy of the activation e-mailed to you.  Note that activating LabVIEW alone requires two of these trips (or at least used to), as the Professional Development system and the Application Builder activate separately.

As far as why I often don't want to use the built-in Web Activation, it stores your serial number on the computer.  This leads most (I think LabVIEW 2017 is an exception) versions of LabVIEW to display your serial number in their splash screens and about boxes - this could be visible in a public setting or at a customer site.  It also stores the serial number even after you deactivate it, so if you temporarily activate a tester while you are doing its initial debug, your serial number will be stored for your customer to reactivate (and possibly distribute).

I labelled this as MAX, as there is no License Manager Idea Exchange - in a way this applies to all NI products.

This is a bit of a feature request for the service request manager and/or as a stand-alone (my NI web) tool!  

It is needed because the NI webpage makes it terribly hard to search for CAR#'s and a CAR# is only listed when solved, and only listed for the one version where it was resolved, making it nigh-on impossible to check lists of (new) CAR#s and get notified when they are resolved.

For example, I know this CAR exists, but I'm not sure if it has been resolved and the NI search just didn't find it, or if does not exist (user input error for example) or anything..

1. The tool should reside on "my NI" but it should be possible to export/share the list of monitored CAR's (so colleageus/companies can maintain one master list of company relevant CAR's).
2. The tool should connect/check against NI (ideally directly to a back-end database) and return any "public" information related to a CAR, such as "in progress", "known work-around", "details" etc. along with driver/software version where it was resolved (if any).
3. The tool should present a clear list (ideally with green checkmarks / red cross icons) showing the status of each CAR and maybe a synopsis/one-liner from the description to indicate what problem the number is for.
4. wish-list added feature:  allow (on a per user basis) the user to add personal notes to a CAR (e.g. this affects projects x, y and z, once resolved, refactor those projects to remove performance intensive work-arounds!) or similar.
5. e-mail notification (optional/configurable) when the status changes on any of the tracked CAR's.

As far as how it relates to the service request manager, I would prefer a separate tool but that it also can link to the service request manager as outlined below:

A small but significant number of tickets either relate to, or create one or more CAR#'s (or at least mine seem to create a large amount of CAR's).

When a support tech adds / associates a ticket# with a CAR#, ideally this CAR# would be automatically added to the user's CAR Tracking list..

In addition it would be great if the back-end database tracked CAR#'s and offered up a list of these numbers in the webpage overview, for example next to the "status" column. Taking it a step further, it would be very nice if NI could make it simpler to check if a CAR has been resolved and if so, what version of LabVIEW it was resolved in/with. This information could be displayed in the same web page table, or a new page to itself. The "Status" column could then also be expanded with a green check-mark if (all) associated CAR#'s have been resolved..

Tracking CAR's and manually trying to search and check them off lists locally is labor intensive, especially since the web-page "search" does not do even a passable job when you enter CAR numbers.

For security reasons, many customers using Volume License Manager to administer licenses to client machines do not authorize users to download and install anything from the web. Therefore, if a critical patch is released, the client machines are unable to download this unless it is distributed by the administrator. It would be useful for the VLM administrator to be able to configure the Update Service such that all Users can run the Update Service but the service has been configured to point to an internal network share rather than an internet location outside the firewall. This way, the administrator could make critical updates and patches available for the client machines and the clients can be notified and install them.

In a database (DBC or xml), signal could have a long name property. This property is not avaible in Xnet databse editor or in LabVIEW. That could be a probleme when several signal have the same first 32 character.

Always with Xnet, when reading signal value (or reading frame and convert frame to signals), the result is always a number. In database, some signal have a convertion table to string for a better understading