Tarantella Administration Guide > Applications, documents and hosts > Creating and publishing an application object to users

Creating and publishing an application object to users

Case study

Indigo Insurance has a new X application, XClaim. The application must appear on the webtops of everyone in the Finance department, as well as the webtop of the President, Indigo Jones. The application is installed on london.indigo-insurance.com, geneva.indigo-insurance.com and prague.indigo-insurance.com, and users must be load-balanced across those application servers.

Solution

1. Log in to a Tarantella server as a Tarantella Administrator. Only Tarantella Administrators can create objects and publish applications.
2. On your webtop, click Object Manager. If you've used Object Manager before, it appears just how you left it.
3. The new application "belongs to" the Finance department, so the application object should belong in the Finance organizational unit. Use the Search or Browse tabs to locate the Finance OU object. Right-click this object, point to New, and then click X Application.
4. Object Manager opens the Finance OU on the Browse tab, and displays a text box. Type the name of the object in the box, for example XClaim, and press Return. This name is used to uniquely identify the object within the OU, and is also shown on a user's webtop.
5. Properties for the new object appear on the right. On the Attributes tab, choose General from the list. These are the attributes you're most likely to want to change. You can get help on any attribute by clicking the context help button, in the lower-right corner of Object Manager, and then clicking the attribute.
6. For Application Command, type the full pathname of the program on the application servers that may run it (the path must be the same on all of them), for example /usr/local/bin/xclaim. You don't put command-line arguments here -- use the Arguments For Command attribute for those.
7. You should set Width and Height to the application size, in pixels. Alternatively you could set Display Using to Client Window Management: this makes the application look like it's running on the client device.
8. If you like, scroll down the list of attributes, and choose different attribute groupings from the list, to see what other settings you can change. When you've finished changing attributes, click Apply.
9. To define the application servers that can run the application, use the Hosts tab of the application object. Drag host objects representing the application servers onto the tab: Tarantella will load-balance users across these application servers. For example, you would add host objects for london.indigo-insurance.com, geneva.indigo-insurance.com and prague.indigo-insurance.com to the Hosts tab to load-balance across these hosts.
10. To add the application to the webtops of everyone in the Finance department, choose Properties for the Finance OU object, and then click the Links tab. Then simply drag the application object onto the tab. Everyone in the OU sees the new application on their webtop the next time they log in, as long as their person object is configured to inherit webtop content from their parent (they are by default).
11. To add the application to Indigo Jones's webtop, use the Search or Browse tabs to locate his person object, choose Properties, click the Links tab, and then drag the application onto the tab.

Next steps

• If you want to add an application to the webtops of all users of a particular type -- such as UNIX users or anonymous users -- use the Links tab of the appropriate profile object.
• If you want to create multiple objects, or to modify many users' webtops at the same time, use the tarantella object command's batch processing capabilities.