- Review of the Apple Remote Desktop Basics
- Adding Workstations to Remote Desktop
- User Accounts and Remote Desktop
- Overview of Remote Desktop Reporting
- Collecting Data for Reports
- Designating an Administrator Computer to Handle/Store Report Data
- Running a Report
- Choosing Between the Report Types and Specifying Details
- Working With Remote Desktop Report Data Outside of Remote Desktop
Working With Remote Desktop Report Data Outside of Remote Desktop
It is possible to interact with the data in the Remote Desktop without using the Remote Desktop application to run reports. This capability allows you to create much more customized queries and reports. However, doing so requires a fair amount of knowledge and comfort working with databases and it is beyond what I can include in this article. Apple’s Remote Desktop Administration Guide does include detailed information about the Remote Desktop report database format. Likewise, Mike Bombich has written a tool called ADAM that allows you to interact with the database using PHP, which so far has proven to be the easiest method of interacting with the database outside of using the Remote Desktop interface. Apple’s Developer Connection website also includes information on how to directly interact with the Remote Desktop database.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, it is very easy to export data from a report to a text file that can be imported and manipulated by any number of database or spreadsheet tools. By combining the Automator in Mac OS X Tiger and the automation capabilities built into Remote Desktop, you can even automate the process or run a report, export it, and import into an external tool.
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