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IT Service Management (ITSM / ITIL)

Powerful, quick, simple, ticket logging software. Tailor the way you want to create tickets.

Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM)

Manage your whole property portfolio, jobs and keep your engineers on the road.

Customer Service Desk Management (CSM)

Help your team to provide quality customer support and use data driven decisions from reports and more.

FOI & SAR Case Management Software

Turn requests into fully audited cases that track Freedom of Information, Subject Access Requests, EIR, Discovery & more.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

Making our house your organisation's digital home
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Windows Client Setup Guide - houseonthehill.com Product Documentation

Windows Client Setup Guide

There are 2 main steps to follow which are outlined below.

Shortcut to the Application

For every user of the HotH client you can add a shortcut to HotH on the user’s desktop.

  • Right click on the Desktop and select New > Shortcut.
  • Type the location of the HotH installation on the network.ie. \\servername\suppdesk\supdskcs.exe
  • Click Next, give the shortcut a name, and then click Finish.
  • Next, right click on the newly-created shortcut, and choose Properties.
  • Ensure that the “Start In” directory is correct – it needs to be the installation directory as shown below.

Setting up the Database Connection

These steps also need to be performed on each client machine that needs to connect to HotH. Make sure you follow the steps for your appropriate database schema.

Microsoft SQL Server & SQL Server Express

  1. Go to Control Panel on the computer, and choose Administrative Tools
  2. Open up Data Sources (ODBC) (If you have a 64-bit client machine then you need to use the 32-bit ODBC. Use the “Run” dialog box, and type %SystemRoot%\SysWow64\odbcad32.exe).
  3. Make sure you have the System DSN tab selected, and click Add…
  4. The Create New Data Source window appears, select SQL Server from the list of names, and then click Finish.
  5. The Create a New Data Source to SQL Server dialogue appears. Give the DSN the name HouseOnTheHill, and enter the description and name of the SQL Server to connect to. An example is given below.
    create new data source
  6. Click Next to move on to the Authentication settings. Make sure you set up the DSN to connect “With SQL Server authentication…”. At the bottom of the window, enter your HotH SQL Server login and password. These are not stored, but are used to confirm that this DSN can connect to SQL Server correctly. An example screenshot is below.
    create new data source: authentication
  7. The next two steps of the Wizard require no changes to be made. When you get to the end of the wizard, you will be prompted to test the connection. If it succeeds, finish the Wizard and close down the Data Source Administrator. If the tests failed, double check the settings on the DSN and ensure that the specified SQL Server is available and open to connections.
  8. You can now log in to HotH. You may be presented with an error when you first log in – this is because HotH does not have the SQL Server username and password yet. Click through the error, switch to the “SQL Settings” tab and enter the SQL Server username and password. You can then log in to HotH!

MySQL

You must download and install the 32-bit MySQL Connector/ODBC on each client machine which requires access to the Windows UI of HotH. The 32-bit MySQL Connector/ODBC can be downloaded from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/odbc/.

Once installed, you need to create an ODBC connection to the database using the 32-bit Data Sources (ODBC) program in Administrative Tools (on 64-bit machines you will find this program in %systemroot%\syswow64\odbcad32.exe).

  1. Go to Control Panel on the computer, and choose Administrative Tools.
  2. Open ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit) program.
  3. Click on the System DSN tab and click Add.
  4. The Create New Data Source window appears, select MySQL ODBC x.y Unicode Driver as the driver (where x.y represents the downloaded version of MySQL ODBC Connector). Click Finish.
  5. Complete the fields as per the screenshot below, namely: Data Source Name, TCP/IP Server (MySQL server), User, Password, click on the Database drop-down and select the HotH schema, click on the Details >> button to expand the bottom section and select Character Set = utf8mb4 (or utf8 in older versions of MySQL). Click the Test button.
  6. mysql connector character set
  7. Assuming the test is successful, click the OK button.
  8. You can now log in to HotH. You may be presented with an error when you first log in – this is because HotH does not have the MySQL username and password yet. Click through the error, switch to the SQL Settings tab and enter the MySQL username and password. Click back to the Login details tab, and log in to HotH.

Database Details Re-entry

If you find that you have to re-enter the database details every time I log into HotH. This is usually due to you not having write permissions to the suppdesk.ini file . The solution is to amend the shortcut to SupportDesk so that the target specifies the directory for the ini file. – using the argument /i”%USERPROFILE%\suppdesk.ini”

Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? Contact documentation@houseonthehill.com

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