Howto deploy trusted sites in Atlassian Companion

[Michael Rudolph]

Hello, i have hundreds of desktops which need to run Atlassian Compannion to edit documents attached to confluence. Can somebody tell me howto deploy the trusted sites to all devices? Thanks Michael

[Alex K · Accepted solution]

As of Companion 1.2.2, this is now supported as a parameter for the MSI installer. You can provide a semi-colon separated list of full domains to the MSI installer through the COMPANION_TRUSTED_DOMAINS parameter. 

See this documentation page for full details including an example. 

Regards,
Alex

[Andy Heinzer]

If you're client machines are using Windows, AND they are all members of the same Domain, then it could be possible for you to use the Group Policy features in Windows Server in order to deploy software packages in an MSI format.

Our documentation in Administering the Atlassian Companion App eludes to this, but doesn't cite specific examples of how to do this.   If you are unfamiliar with this, then I'd recommend checking out a Microsoft guide on using this such as How to use Group Policy to remotely install software in Windows Server 2008 and in Windows Server 2003.  I realize that guide is made for the older versions of windows, but I imagine the steps are just about the same for current versions.

I suspect that you might want to customize or transform that msi file in order to place your own site settings to make it easier to install for all your clients. In cases like that, you will need to use a utility such as Orca.  This is a Microsoft utility you can use to create mst files, (MSI transform files) and with these files you can deploy the msi file to include your specific site changes.

If you're machines are not on a domain, or you're clients are using Mac OS, then there isn't a way to use group policy to achieve this.  There might be other ways to deploy this software en masse but I must admit I don't have much experience in other solutions.

[PM]

Sorry but that's an useless answer.

Is it possible to specify how to add such specific sites in the msi file? I'm wondering why it isn't possible to deploy this specific sites with a registry key or an additional file in a specific folder.

So please give us more information.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi @PM 

Thanks for the feedback.  Re-reading my previous reply I have to agree with you.  I don't think we have given you enough specific and detailed information do this yet.  

So I dug into this a bit further to see how the companion app is working to do this.  At least as of today, in the 0.6.0 version, it doesn't look like the trusted sites are stored in the system registry for windows system.  Instead it looks like the Companion App is storing this trusted site data in an internal leveldb.

These setting files appear to be stored in the C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Atlassian Companion\ directory in my example.   I found that I could copy those files to a backup, then clear the trusted sites.  If I then shutdown the companion, and restored my backup of that directory and it's sub-directories and restarted the companion app, my use of the companion app still showed my site as trusted.   So perhaps it could be possible to copy this set of files out to client machines as a means to automatically trust your specific Confluence site in their sessions.

However I don't have a clear means to do that and deploy this to multiple machines.  My initial hunch of creating a MST transform with Orca is not something I think is going to be viable at this time.   Sorry this is probably not the answer you were hoping for here.  I did locate an existing feature request to allow users to customize the Companion MSI file over in CONFSERVER-57525.  I would recommend watching and voting on this issue.  Should this come to a later version, or if other users find a work-around, I would expect this request to be updated with this information.

Regards,

Andy

[Software-Admin]

Hi Michael
did you find a way to configure your setting for the Atlassian Companion regarding the trusted sites?
We do have the same scenario in our company and want to roll out the Companion App by SCCM and I'd love to configure the trusted site parameter for the MSI.
Thanks for a quick reply & Best regards
Alex

[Michael Rudolph]

Hi Alex,

fortunately Atlassian decided to bring back the old office document support. So for us there is currently no need to use the companion app. But in my test environment it worked to copy the whole folder "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Atlassian Companion\" from a configured computer to any other user via login-script.

Regards

Michael

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's a question for your infrastructure team - deploying software across an estate of many client computers is not an Atlassian thing.

[Michael Rudolph]

That's not the question. To install the msi is not the challange. But if you access an attachment the first time the compannion asks you if you trust the conflunece instance. And this trust must be deployed to all users because they don't know what to do with the message.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's still a client side activity - you will need to deploy something on the clients to do it automatically, or educate your users.

[Michael Rudolph]

Your are so bright. I've posted my question because I need to know the so called "something" which need to be deployed.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've re-read the docs and what you need to deploy is "the trust that your users need to have in your confluence system".  It's either getting them educated, or rewriting the application so you can botch something in to bypass it.