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Deploying Browsium Client

Installing BCMS includes a link to the Browsium Client and makes it readily available to install throughout your organization — with a reasonably sized server supporting up to 10,000 clients. (Multiple servers can be grouped together in clusters to scale to hundreds of thousands of clients.) To get the most out of Proton, you’ll want to install Browsium Client on every PC in your enterprise. This is easy to do using Browsium-ClientSetup.exe and some careful planning.

Browsium software is licensed per user, and seat licenses are required for each PC so check your Browsium license agreement before deploying.

It is assumed that the reader of this guide is familiar with enterprise deployment of client software and has available tools to perform a scaled deployment. Section 1.2 of this guide details the command line switches available when installing Browsium Client in an enterprise environment. These options range from silent installation with no installation user interface visible to end users to pre-configuring the BCMS URL in the client registry.

Installing Browsium Client

Section titled “Installing Browsium Client”

To deploy Browsium-ClientSetup.exe, along with the Proton Server URL, there are two simple steps:

  1. Retrieve a copy of Browsium-ClientSetup.exe from the Browsium Proton zip file you received from Browsium, the Browsium Client Manager web page, or from the Proton Program Files directory where you installed BCMS. This is found in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Browsium\Browsium Client Management Server\Server\Sites\Server folder of the BCMS.

  2. Identify the URL to your BCMS to include in your installation command line script as the value for SERVER_URL. This URL must be the Fully Qualified Domain Name and port (if other than 443). You may leave this blank and add it later via Group Policy, as detailed in section 2.1.2.

The SERVER_URL value must end with the /server so the clients can communicate with the Browsium Client server. Failure to set the SERVER_URL value properly may result in errors or unexpected client performance.

The following example will install Browsium-ClientSetup.exe with a Browsium Client Server URL in ‘quiet mode’ with ‘no user interface’. This command can be scripted to deploy to hundreds or thousands of client PCs using a variety of enterprise management tools.

Open Command Prompt as Administrator, enter the path to Browsium-ClientSetup.exe (located in C:\Browsium in this example), add the /qn switch, and substitute the SERVER_URL value with your FQDN/server. Include :<your server port> before /server if using any port other than 443.

Enabling Browsium Client with the BCMS URL

Section titled “Enabling Browsium Client with the BCMS URL”

To facilitate client deployment scenarios, Browsium Client can be deployed in a dormant state. By default, all Browsium Client installations will be dormant until a BCMS URL value is defined in the registry (or a Catalyst or Ion configuration file pointer in the appropriate LoadFromFileName registry entry). Setting SERVER_URL at install time will populate the ConfigurationServerURL registry value and Browsium Client will be immediately enabled for communication with your BCMS.

If no SERVER_URL value is passed during the client installation, or no value is set using Group Policy, the Browsium Client processes will silently terminate immediately after startup and failing to find this value (unless Catalyst or Ion configuration file pointers are found in the registry). This option is especially useful for organizations to deploy the Browsium Client during a maintenance window and then activate the clients at any time outside that period.

To activate Browsium Client later, populate the appropriate registry key location and value. The Proton service will activate automatically when Browsium Controller starts (at reboot or user logoff/logon) and detects a ConfigurationServerURL value in the registry.

Browsium software follows the standard Windows registry hive precedence hierarchy to load the configuration that will be used on a given end user system. Once a valid configuration is found, the Browsium software will stop searching and that configuration will be used.

Deploying different Proton server URL values on a single PC may cause unpredictable results as only the configuration highest in the hierarchy will be used.

The following table provides the hierarchy of Proton Server URL precedence in the Windows registry. The string “(Wow6432Node)” in the registry path denotes the Wow6432Node registry key that will be included in the path on 64-bit Windows systems. 32-bit Windows systems do not contain this key, hence the use of parentheses in the example.

The following example shows ConfigurationServerURL populated during Browsium Client installation (1^st^ in the hierarchy above).

This next example shows ConfigurationServerURL populated by Group Policy (2^nd^ in the hierarchy above).