More and more of our customers have requested that we integrate AnyDesk in Royal TS. Unfortunately, fully integrating external applications by creating new plugins is very time-consuming. This is the reason why we created the "External Application" object; to give our users the ability to integrate external applications if the need should arise. In this tutorial, we will use AnyDesk as an example of how to integrate external applications in Royal TS using the External Application feature.
For security reasons, the AnyDesk client does not allow a password for unattended access to be set from the command line directly as this would enable malicious users to spy the password from the command line in Task Manager. Instead, a pipe is used to set the password. This makes integrating AnyDesk a little more complicated, but not impossible. In order to make this work, you will have to configure the external application using the "cmd.exe" to start the AnyDesk client and pipe in the password as follows:
In this case, we used the following argument:
echo password | "C:\Program Files (x86)\AnyDesk\AnyDesk.exe" anydeskid --with-password"
Since the AnyDesk password and ID are sensitive information, we strongly suggest storing them in the credentials as follows:
Once you have done that, you can reference them in the argument using $EffectivePassword$ and $EffectiveUsername$ as follows:
/c "echo $EffectivePassword$ | "C:\Program Files (x86)\AnyDesk\AnyDesk.exe" $EffectiveUsername$ --with-password"
Please note, that since you are starting the AnyDesk client via the command line, we recommend configuring the following setting under "Advanced - Options" to prevent the command-line window from opening:
It is also important to mention that if you configure your AnyDesk External Application object like this, the AnyDesk client will open in an external window. Some people might prefer this, others may not. If you want to embed the AnyDesk window, some additional configuration is necessary. Configuring the following settings under "Advanced - Process Tracking" will allow you to embed the client:
Please Note: As of AnyDesk v7.1.8 changes made to AnyDesk prevent it from being embedded in Royal TS. The documentation will, however, remain unchanged since this is an example and should work for most other applications.