Tag: Dictation

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BigHand Digital Dictation and RES Automation Manager – License file update

Following on from the BigHand Digital Dictation and RES Automation Manager – BHF File Locations post, I’ll show you how easy it is to update the BigHand license files across all BigHand servers in your estate with RES Automation Manager.

Managing your BigHand Digital Dictation system using RES Automation Manager

BigHand is a powerful dictation product used in many environments, but most prevalent in the Legal and Medical sectors.  With enhancements such as speech recognition and workflows more and more users are relying on this business critical tool. In these posts I will go through the automation of two of the most common tasks required on the system; Updating license files and locating a dictation file.

Update license files

License files are supplied by BigHand as a .lic file.  They must be located in a particular location on every BigHand server in your environment.  If you have a BigHand file store server in every site, BigHand gateway for telephony or Mobile client there can quickly become lots of servers requiring a license file, this is a time consuming process which can easily be automated and here’s how.

Stop services
All the BigHand services should be stopped before you can update the license file.  These need to be done in a particular sequence.  For this you can use Service properties (Manage) task in the Configuration folder.

  1. Stop Branch site BigHand services (If you only have 1 BigHand server you can ignore this)
    a. On the settings tab select Change Service State
    b. In service name enter BigHand Server x.x (where x.x is the version number) or you can connect to the server using the browse button and select the service
    c. In New Service State select Stop service.
    d. You need to set a condition on this task so that it only runs for branch sites, so select the condition tab.
    e. Under expressions select Add and then Registry Setting
    f. Click the browse button next to the Operand field and connect to your Master BigHand server’s registry.  Drill down to the following key and double click: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigHand\BHServer_x.x\ServerGuid
    g. The Operand and Value will be added to the fields, ensure the operator is equals and click Ok.
    h. Select “If the condition is TRUE then Skip this task”.
    i. Select “If the condition is FALSE then Execute this task, but skip all remaining tasks in this module” and click OK.
  2. Stop all Master services
    a. Create another 5 Manage service tasks and repeat steps a – c for the following services (the order is important to avoid conflicting dependencies):
    i. BigHand Gateway service
    ii. BigHand External Workflow server service
    iii. BigHand Active directory service
    iv. BigHand Services host service
    v. BigHand Server x.x service

Backup old license file and copy new license file

  1. Click Add and Select Files (Perform operations) from the configuration folder
    c. On the settings tab click add and select Delete as the action type
    d. In the source path enter C:\Program Files\Common Files\BigHand\BHServer.old (Default location) and click OK.
    e. On the settings tab click add and select Rename as the action type
    f. In the source path enter C:\Program Files\Common Files\BigHand\BHServer.lic
    g. In the Destination path enter C:\Program Files\Common Files\BigHand\BHServer.old and click OK.
    h. Ensure Ignore Errors is checked and click OK.
    i. Click Add and select Resource (Download) from the provisioning folder
    j. On the settings tab click Add and browse to the license file resource
    k. Check specify destination folder, in the destination enter C:\Program Files\Common Files\BigHand\  and click OK.
    l. Clone both of the File tasks you have just created, open them and change the source and destinations to C:\Program Files\BigHand\BigHand Services\
    m. These two file tasks will need conditions so they only run on the master server, click the Conditions tab and click add
    n. Select registry setting and add the value from 1f above.
    o. Select If true Execute and If false Skip task and click OK

Start services

  1. For this you can use the Service properties (Manage) task in the Configuration folder again, except this time you must select Start service as the new service state.  The jobs must run in the following order:
    a. BigHand Active directory service
    b. BigHand External Workflow server service
    c. BigHand gateway service
    d. BigHand services host service
    e. BigHand Server x.x service (Master site)
    f. BigHand Server x.x service (Branch).
  2. Be sure to set a condition on these using the BigHand server GUID as before, that way the job will not try to start services that do not exist.
  3. That’s it, you’re done.
  4. Finally, you could configure a job to check each service and email the results.
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BigHand Digital Dictation and RES Automation Manager – BHF File locations

Whilst this post is targeted at retrieving archived BigHand dictation file locations, it does demonstrate how we can use RES Automation Manager parameters and its Microsoft SQL integration to good effect.

Locating a Dictation File

BigHand holds dictations in a proprietary format with the extension .BHF.  This is essentially just a WAV file with minor modifications.  Once a user has completed a dictation it will disappear from their view after a pre-determined number of days.  If you have a reason to retrieve one of these files once it is removed or if a system corruption means you need to re-import dictations there is no easy way to identify the file, as the files have GUID filenames and can be sitting on any file store server in your BigHand estate.  Using a combination of SQL and Automation Manager you can make everyone’s life easier.

Create SQL View

First you will need to create a SQL view on your BigHand SQL instance called Find_Dictation_Location as per the below script:
SELECT     a.BH_FirstName, a.BH_LastName, a.BH_UserName, b.BH_Title, CONVERT(varchar(10), b.BH_CreationDate, 103) AS BH_CreationDate,
b.BH_CompletionDate, b.BH_Deleted AS BH_Deleted_Task, b.BH_Destination, b.BH_Description, b.BH_MatterNumber, b.BH_DocumentType,
b.BH_Confidential, b.BH_FileRequired, b.BH_Open, c.BH_FileGuid, c.BH_Location, c.BH_Version, CAST(d.BH_URL AS nvarchar(4000))
+ CAST(SUBSTRING(c.BH_Path, 2, LEN(c.BH_Path)) AS nvarchar(4000)) AS Path, c.BH_Deleted AS BH_Deleted_File
FROM         dbo.BH_Users WITH (nolock) a INNER JOIN
dbo.BH_Tasks WITH (nolock) b ON a.BH_UserGuid = b.BH_Author INNER JOIN
dbo.BH_FileLocations WITH (nolock) c ON b.BH_TaskGuid = c.BH_FileGuid INNER JOIN
dbo.BH_Locations WITH (nolock) d ON c.BH_Location = d.BH_Location

Automation Manager SQL Query

Next you need to run a SQL query against that view to retrieve the URL of the file, but the SQL query needs to be edited every time you use it, so let’s create an AM job to do this.
1. Create a Module and Add a SQL Statement (Query) task from the advanced folder
2. On the settings tab add the following SQL query:
select BH_UserName,BH_Title,BH_CreationDate,path,BH_Deleted_File from Find_Dictation_Location
where bh_username like ‘%$[Username]%’ and
BH_Title like ‘%$[Title]%’ and
BH_CreationDate like ‘%$[Date]%’
Note the parameter references in the SQL query ($[Username], $[Title] and $[Date]).  These are the fields required to identify the dictation.  Obviously these can be changed to any of the fields available in the SQL view.
So that AM can insert the correct variables into the script you will need to create parameters for:
a. Username (Username)
• This will allow a full or part entry of the user who created the dictation
b. Dictation title (Title)
• This will allow a full or part entry of the Dictation title
c. Time and Date (Date)
• This must be the exact creation date; you can set a mask for the parameter on the input tab in the format 00/00/0000.
Once these are created, you will be able to run the query against your SQL instance.  It will collect information on the dictations you specified by looking up the relevant GUIDs in the database and create a field entry (Path) that has the URL built up from the separate BH_Locations and BH_FileLocations tables.  This will then be presented in the Job results for the query.
View results in Automation Manager Job History

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