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Remote Deployment - Configuration and Synchronization

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Exclaimer Support
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Relevant Product: Auto Responder | Signature Manager Exchange Edition

WARNING!  The following products were discontinued on 30 June 2021 and are no longer available for purchase or supported:

- Exclaimer Auto Responder

- Exclaimer Email Alias Manager for Exchange  

- Exclaimer Mail Archiver

For more information, please see the Discontinued Questions and Answers page.

WARNING! The following products were discontinued on 30 September 2022:

- Exclaimer Signature Manager Outlook Edition

- Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition
 

The end of Support for these products is 30th September 2024.

For more information, please see the Discontinued Questions and Answers page.

If you have multiple Exclaimer installations on your network (for example, you might have servers in different offices around the country), you can manage configuration in a single location and deploy this to all other servers.

This page consists of the following sections:

Remote deployment

To carry out a remote deployment:

  1. Within the Exclaimer Console, navigate to the Remote Deployment tab and specify a shared location:
    img001.jpg
  2. When you save any changes to the configuration, you are prompted to confirm if you would like to deploy them to other servers. If you opt to deploy the changes, a file is written to the remote deployment folder and imported by other installations.

    Note: Initially, Exclaimer software must be installed on each server - installation cannot be completed via remote deployment. Once installed, specify a remote deployment folder to manage subsequent configuration changes with remote deployment (each installation must have the same remote deployment folder).

How remote deployment works

In simple terms,

  • Within the Exclaimer Console, from the Remote Deployment tab, you define the remote deployment folder. This specified folder must be a shared folder on the network (only one remote deployment folder should be used on an entire domain).

  • When you save any configuration changes, the computer (on which those changes have been saved) pushes the new configuration data to the remote deployment folder.

  • Remote machines receive notifications from the operating system when the new configuration data is detected in the shared folder, and they then pull (that is, import) that data into their local installation.

  • Push and pull operations are completed via the Exclaimer Signature Manager Exchange Edition Remote Deployment service.

Remote Deployment folder

You create a shared folder on your network that is accessible to all machines that are running the Exclaimer product.

If you do not want the share to be visible to users, you can use a hidden share. This is done by adding a dollar ($) symbol to the end of the share name. For example, hidden shares cannot be viewed when browsing the network with Explorer.

Ensure that the user who is logged into the Exclaimer Console (that is, saving data) has read and write access to this folder; or simply set Domain Admins to have these permissions, as long as the user is a member of this role group.

The following sections describe two methods of applying for folder read permissions. Both these methods are applicable for both sharing and NTFS Security permissions in the shared folder; that is, you must make the same permission changes in both the sharing and security tabs of the folder’s properties dialog.

  • Folder Permissions (Easy Method)
    Allow the Everyone group to have Read permissions.

  • Folder Permissions (Secure Method)
    Allow Read permissions only for the computer account of each server with the Exclaimer product installed upon it.

    This is essential because the Remote Deployment service runs under the LocalSystem account; this account (as the name suggests) only has access to the local system of the machine that it is running on - not to any network resources.

    The only way this account can ever see a network resource is when the computer account is given specific access to that resource; that is, the folder on the network resource allows itself to be accessed by the LocalSystem account of a specific remote machine. In this case, access is restricted to only reading data from the remote deployment folder.

    Example permission settings:img002.jpg

Remote Deployment with Template Editor

You need to grant additional permissions when using the Signature Manager Exchange Edition alongside the Template Editor. In order to publish templates directly to the server from the Template Editor, the server with the Template Library share needs to have full control permissions for the Remote Deployment share. This is because the configuration service will initiate Remote Deployment after a template has been published from the Template Editor and this service runs under the LocalSystem account.

Example permission settings: 

img003.jpg

Finally, you will need particular folder permissions if you have multiple servers and use remote deployment for any of the following Exclaimer products:

  • Template Editor (stand-alone product)
  • Signature Manager Exchange Edition
  • Signature Manager Outlook Edition
  • Auto Responder

In such scenarios, the remote deployment operation is initiated by the Configuration Service which runs under the context of NETWORK SERVICE. You need to ensure that NETWORK SERVICE has read and modify permissions for the remote deployment folder.

 

Remote Deployment timings

Every few minutes, the Remote Deployment service performs a check to see if a deployment file has been written to this location. If it has, then the file is added to a queue which will perform the actual import of the configuration.

Please note, the import of these files depends on a number of environmental factors, so may take from a few seconds to a number of minutes to actually complete.

Before you check that configuration changes have been successfully applied to remote machines, sufficient time should be allowed for those machines to perform the import (please keep in mind that the import can take some time with complex configurations).

 

Changing the Existing Remote Deployment folder

If all installations are set to point to a specific remote deployment folder and you later decide to change that folder - then you don't need to manually change every server to point to the new location.

If you change the location on one machine and save the configuration, that machine will write a copy of the configuration data to both the old AND the new locations. Any servers pointing to the old location will import the configuration which includes the new remote deployment folder path so, on subsequent deployments, they will pull data from the new location.

Also, you are advised NOT to delete the old remote deployment folder until enough time has elapsed for all remote machines to import the configuration file that contains the new folder location.


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