Branding Wayk Now

Hi Raphael,

Can you describe how you would like this feature to be implemented, and which parts of the application you would like to rebrand? Here is a suggestion, let me know if it would work for your use case:

When launched, Wayk Now could check a local path, and a global path on the system for branding files, such as the logo .png image. If the branding files are found, they would be loaded and used instead of the built-in ones. This particular feature would not be limited to the paid version. However, more advanced rebranding features that would go beyond this suggestion would be limited to the paid version.

What do you think?

Best regards,
-Marc-Andre

- Is it possible to custimize the Wayk Now executable to publish it on our own website?
- Look and feel: Company logo
- Options: Predefined settings
- Operation: Only ‘Allow Remote Control’

It is not possible to customize the Wayk Now executable at this point, but we are considering adding such a feature. Which versions of Wayk Now are you interested in: the self-contained executable, or the .msi installer? Also, do you have needs for platforms other than Windows? Are you using products with a similar feature, such that we could take a look to get a better understanding?

Best regards,

We want to create a customized self-contained executable, which we want to make available on one of our websites (behind a remote support link).
Currently we only have the need for the Windows platform, but we might want to add Apple Mac in the future.


We don't use other products right now, but we have seen customized TeamViewer QuickSupport executables that are customized with a logo and only the display of the code for remote support (without the option to take remote control).

Thank you for the explanation. Just to let you know that a self contained executable is harder to do than an msi with your logo and the configuration deployed at the same time. For the self contained, we have to resign the application with our Application Code Certificate.

Regards

I would agree that this is also an important point with all of our clients.
Especially because the users have never heard about Wayk Now and implicitly don't trust anything new (as they have been instructed by there IT departments).

This would ease a future migration a lot, away from competing products that users already are comfortable with and use remote clients that already contain customised logo, text and etc.

Just my 5 cents ;)

Hi,

I think it has become clear at this point that such a feature is something of interest. I have started evaluating the required work, it would just be a matter of when we can have it ready. I can't make any promises, but we are considering the possibility of adding this as a feature in Wayk Den on-premises. Licensed Wayk Den customers would be able to submit resources files to one of our servers that would generate a modified Wayk Now package that could be distributed separately. At a minimum, we should be able to rebrand the Windows version, we will see how we handle other platforms afterwards depending on the demand.

Best regards,

Hi Marc,

I'm new to Wayk Now, and this is an important feature for me. Has there been any further work or beta towards branding the Windows version at this stage? An update on this feature request would be awesome. --JM

Hi John,

Here is a quick update regarding the white label feature:

The current short term focus is getting the unattended mode ready (https://forum.devolutions.net/topic27041-run-as-a-service-remote-login.aspx). However, we have the Wayk Now white label feature high on our priority list due to multiple requests from customers. Since the last post in this thread, I did further research on the different ways this could be implemented.

One thing we discovered is we can modify the resource segment in a Windows executable without affecting code signing, which is good news because we now have a way to avoid having to code sign the executable a second time. I did an internal proof of concept to validate the technique: we can embed a 7-Zip archive containing branding resources inside the executable and load its contents at runtime. Modifying the executable can be done using the Resource Hacker tool.

The actual work still has to be done: we have to modify the program to load and use branding resources, build a default branding template, provide instructions and guidelines, and then provide a way to simplify the whole executable modification process. We haven't ruled out the possibility of exposing the modification process as a web service where one would submit resource files to obtain a modified executable.

Best regards,

Hi,
I agree with your all points I would like to add branding also includes about the product quality, it also creates a huge impact we need to do correct marketing strategies for better branding.
Branding may not be done in a day but if we do marketing in a correct way with the correct marketing strategy it may give a positive impact on our brand.
Thanks

We are working hard on it.

Regards

Just a quick update regarding this feature, because I know a lot of users are eager to see it happen:

We have initial support for rebranding the Windows version, by placing an archive containing images and a json file inside %ProgramData%\Wayk or %AppData%\Wayk. We still have to review the structure of this archive and prepare a sample white label bundle that should be used as a reference. It is not everything that has been asked, but this means that one could deploy this file to rebrand Wayk Now without having to modify the original executable.

We have reviewed the different ways that the executable could be modified post-compilation to include additional resources, and unfortunately, it looks like past methods for doing so without breaking code signing no longer work with recent versions of Windows. This means that in order to provide an executable that bundles custom resources, one would need to code sign the executable again with its own valid certificate. We could provide some documentation on how to do that, but it would be for advanced users. To make this feature usable for most people, we will have to look into providing a web service that will build and code sign custom executables automatically.


The full feature set will unfortunately require more time and work, but we hope that the initial white label support will be enough to get started for many of you. I will post some screenshots soon to show what it will look like.

Best regards,

I have a little teaser for those waiting for the white label feature: a first screenshot of a rebranded Wayk Now, along with a sample branding resource archive.

This white label feature will initially be available only for Windows by placing a "branding.7z" archive in either %ProgramData%\Wayk or %AppData%\Wayk. If things go well, the Wayk Now 3.0 release should accept the branding.7z archive.

The archive contains images, icons and json files to specify the images, icons and strings to use to rebrand Wayk Now. We have used the "Windjammer" fictional company for our sample white label bundle.

Best regards,

hi ..
please advice ...
any update on branding?

also cannot change files or text inside branding.7z not working after zip archive

tnx
Regards
michael.

Hi Michael,

I just tried the branding.7z archive with the latest version of Wayk Now and it still works fine. Did you recompress the archive as a 7-zip (.7z) archive? .zip is not supported, only .7z. If you did, maybe one of the modifications you made to the files broke it in some way, we can take a look if you send your modified branding.7z to support@devolutions.net mentioning this forum thread as reference.

Best regards,

tnx Marc-André .. working ...
needed to copy into 7z archive and not extract it ..


also please advice how can i put in install or in AppData\Roaming\Wayk default personal password and connection account to service server den... ?


tnx


[/quote]

Hello Michaell

There is a command-line interface that can be used to configure settings. Simply run the application on the command line with the `config` command.

For example:

C:\users\richard\desktop\wayknow.exe config [parameter to configure]

If you installed Wayk Now using the .msi, it's even easier, because we provide an alias to the executable. So that command would become, simply:

wayk-now config [parameter to configure]

To set a default personal password, you need two commands. First, set the personal password:

Next, ensure Wayk Now is set to use the personal password, instead of the generated one:

(1 corresponds to the custom password, 0 to the generated password)

The Den user login is not currently configurable outside of the Wayk Now client itself. It is difficult to automate as it requires the user to login via the web interface. We are investigating options to improve that.

Please let me know if that answers you questions, or if you have further questions or feedback.

Thanks and kind regards,

I have to say that it's honestly awesome that wayk has a white label. I have not yet tested it but it would obviously also be kinda awesome to at least have archive-based branding for other Platforms (in my case linux) less for branding but just to look awesome, lol.

Hello

Thanks for the feedback. For your information, white label is available on both Windows and macOS. The inherent limitations of iOS (and probably Android) mean it's unlikely to be supported there.

Adding white label to Linux is something we plan to do, but I can't estimate a date for that. I'll add your comments to the internal product board and would encourage anyone else interested in that feature to add their voice here.

Thanks and happy new year,

thx. are there also updates on adding it to the exe or whatever to have it usable for example when distributing simple remote exes?

could also perhaps have some settings attached like for example server only or whatever.


well other platforms mostly was for computers anyway, or can wayk even be used to control droid and ios?

but the help would need updating about the path used in mac.

Hello again

The status of creating an .exe that contains the custom branding is unchanged. The difficulty remains that embedding the branding breaks the code signature on the binary.

From our side, we will need to provide a web service that can receive and validate the branding archive, embed it inside the application, and re-sign the binary. Of course that process is different for each platform we support as well. We do aim to provide such a service but I can't provide any timeline for that currently.

An advanced user could embed the branding manually and re-sign the binary using their own certificate, and that is something we could provide some guidance or documentation for if there is enough interest.

On macOS, the branding will be loaded from "~/Library/Application Support/Wayk/branding.7z". If it's not found, I believe we also check "/Library/Application Support/Wayk/branding.7z" although I'm not sure how straightforward it is to deploy files there on a modern macOS system protected by SIP. We will update the help content to reflect that.

Thanks and kind regards,

Hello again

I just looked into this and the help topic for white label doesn't reflect the macOS support at all, which has some necessary differences from Windows (e.g. the icon is in .icns format).

We will see that the help topic gets updated in due course.

Thanks and kind regards,

Okay would have been awesome if such a service would already exist as both teamviewer and anydesk and even the free ultravnc SC offer branding with iirc all 3 of them being signed, with the last one using a relatively simple web service.

Although wouldn't a proxy application that just extracts to temp and then starting the (signed) wayk which just looks for the branding next to it also work at least kinda

A quick and dirty work around I can see would be if the executable would have 1 more location to lookup it's configuration files.

Instead of looking only in Appdata or programdata, it should first look in it's current directory.
Both for a config file, and a branding file.
This would allow users to simply create an archived file for someone else to download and extract and have a completely portable version of WaykNow with the desired settings and branding.

I would agree that this is also an important point with all of our clients.
Especially because the users have never heard about Wayk Now and implicitly don't trust anything new (as they have been instructed by there IT departments).

This would ease a future migration a lot, away from competing products that users already are comfortable with and use remote clients that already contain customised logo, text and etc.

Just my 5 cents ;)

which is why I have a BIG wayk now logo on the support section of the website of our workplace.
but I totally agree that a branded wayk for download would be a ton of fun.

especially if one could send a branding config and the latest version could just be auto-built on the site and be able to be easily accessed using a specific link anytime needed.

obviously enough that would and should be an enterprise feature due to the resources and trust involved (I mean it is a signed branded executable, you dont want someone pulling a tech scam with a "microsoft support tool" lol.

i actually wrote a powershell script which utilises the wayknow-ps module which then allows fully customisation,
I then used ps2exe to convert it to a single exe (less than 1mb in size) and then digitally signed it using our certificate :)

it simple does the following:

1. installs the wayknow powershell module
2. Sets the config variables globally, e.g. language, password, waykdenserver, only remote control
3. downloads my branding from our server then installs branding via the waykden powershell module
4. installs the waykden setup via there powershell module (which actually downloads the latest and installs via msi)
5. renames all desktop and start menu icons to my program name
6. then displays the server id to the end user to give to the engineer

good thing about this is it sets it up as a service too, so I can connect in later if I need to so long as the end user provides user/pass to myself for updates etc...

happy to share it if anybody interested :)

Hi Simon,

I think this is a brilliant idea, I really like it! I was actually thinking of repurposing our packer executable (the standalone .exe contains the 32-bit and 64-bit executable of Wayk Now, and extracts the proper one) to do something like this instead.

By packaging a PowerShell script to bootstrap everything, it would be trivial to adapt it to do pretty much anything custom at the same time.

Yes, please share your script and how you used ps2exe to get it done, I will definitely take a look at it. It could serve as a starting point and then we could look into making an improved ps2exe replacement with more features in it.

The way I understood it, ps2exe wraps a single PowerShell script, so I'm guessing your script installs the WaykNow-ps module from PSGallery? If this is what it does, one possible improvement would be to package the PowerShell module inside the executable.

As for others reading this thread, I'd be curious to know if this type of solution would be suitable for your needs.

Thanks a lot!

Best regards,

Hi,

i have made a repo on github for you to look at it - https://github.com/si458/wayknowapp

i am also happy to accept any pull requests if i have made mistakes :)

i have never learnt powershell before so didnt no where to start but a bit of googling and i made the script

its not perfect and its not pretty but it does the job !!!

i will add a readme soon to explain how i converted it to exe

Regards

Simon

this looks very interesting but changing stuff on system and going full install is at least for what I use wayk mainly (helping literally random people), not really a great option, but the idea is awesome, if this can be combined with the standalone packer while not changing stuff on this system permanently (like e.g. loading branding, configs and stuff from execution path, which in case of the exe would be the temp extract path) this would be super awesome.

Leave it with me and I will write another script :)

im theory the branding.zip can just be downloaded and put inside the users roaming folder,
so you would just then need to download the exe from there website,
then run the exe that’s been downloaded as a temp file and it would recognise the branding

its also possible to set the a custom waykden url too from the exe (will have a look as it was on another forum post how to do it)

this looks very interesting but changing stuff on system and going full install is at least for what I use wayk mainly (helping literally random people), not really a great option, but the idea is awesome, if this can be combined with the standalone packer while not changing stuff on this system permanently (like e.g. loading branding, configs and stuff from execution path, which in case of the exe would be the temp extract path) this would be super awesome.

hi,

ok added a portable version which can be converted to a single exe,
its long winded at mo because sadly you have to set configurations one at a time, you can’t set multiple at once, although that would be an amazing feature!!!

just comment out the lines you don’t need (poss the waykden)

regards

simon

interesting, might be even better if the wayk exe itself could just accept configs/branding from working dir as that would allow to to be more portable and stuff

but cool. now if I could get my waykden to actually work it would be kinda nice.

interesting, might be even better if the wayk exe itself could just accept configs/branding from working dir as that would allow to to be more portable and stuff

but cool. now if I could get my waykden to actually work it would be kinda nice.

sadly that’s not how its designed, the branding.zip must be located within the global programdata for the whole computer and every user OR the local appdata for the current user

however I have read up, you can base64 encode files inside powershell scripts so when you compile the powershell script into the exe, the branding.zip is included already! No download required!

it also means you might be able to include the portable exe as well inside a single exe you create from the powershell script

no downloads!!!

more playing around tomorrow me believes :)

Hi Simon,

The Set-WaykNowConfig command supports multiple parameters being passed as the same time, so you don't need to call it once for each parameter.

The 'wayk-now config' command is limited to one parameter at a time, however.

Since ps2exe doesn't seem to support bundling resources that would be extracted on launch, this is something we could support in our improved version. The idea would be to package multiple resources in a .zip (or .7z) file that would be extracted to a temporary location and then executed from there.

The WaykNow cmdlet could be packaged like it currently is in the Wayk Now .msi installer. We just fetch it from PSGallery with a Save-Module command, and then it is possible to run an Import-Module with the path to the saved module on disk without relying on PowerShellGet and PSGallery.

By the way, if you want to grab the real WaykNow executables from the standalone WaykNow.exe executable, you can launch it with WaykNow.exe --extract. You should find WaykNow32.exe and WaykNow64.exe in the current directory.

Regarding the possibility of doing a temporary service registration (similar to TeamViewer self-elevation as SYSTEM) one would need the same artifacts installed with the .msi installer. I think it is possible to extract an .msi without installation using 7-zip on Windows, but we could also look into pushing a .zip file with all the build artifacts on the CDN in addition to our .msi to facilitate such usage.

Last but not least, there's discussion about using file from the current working directory instead of the standard directories used by Wayk Now. Is the desire to bootstrap Wayk Now for it to potentially be installed later on? If this is the case, I'm thinking it might be better to modify the files in the standard paths, otherwise the settings won't be transferred.

If the goal is really to work in complete isolation from the existing Wayk Now settings, we could do something like that, but settings wouldn't be applied and persisted afterwards. It's ok, but I just wanted to verify that this is the intended behaviour.

Best regards,

interesting, might be even better if the wayk exe itself could just accept configs/branding from working dir as that would allow to to be more portable and stuff

but cool. now if I could get my waykden to actually work it would be kinda nice.

sadly that’s not how its designed, the branding.zip must be located within the global programdata for the whole computer and every user OR the local appdata for the current user

however I have read up, you can base64 encode files inside powershell scripts so when you compile the powershell script into the exe, the branding.zip is included already! No download required!

it also means you might be able to include the portable exe as well inside a single exe you create from the powershell script

no downloads!!!

it's not just no downloads but also no need for placing stuff into the computer permanently or needing to clean up.

Regarding the possibility of doing a temporary service registration (similar to TeamViewer self-elevation as SYSTEM) one would need the same artifacts installed with the .msi installer. I think it is possible to extract an .msi without installation using 7-zip on Windows, but we could also look into pushing a .zip file with all the build artifacts on the CDN in addition to our .msi to facilitate such usage.

couldn't it also not just start the service executable as system instead of doing a service registration? because if you go and register the service a cleanup would be needed when wayk exists and if it's a crash that wont happen.

can you explain your goal my1 ?

what is it ur trying to do exactually?

i understand you wanted a customised color/image/name etc (branding)
i also understand you want a version which requires no install (portable)

anything else im missing?

you could just take my portable powershell script as it does this for you, it can be run standalone or converted to exe, it just currently requires the internet to download files etc, which only takes a few seconds to run

can you explain your goal my1 ?

what is it ur trying to do exactually?

i understand you wanted a customised color/image/name etc (branding)
i also understand you want a version which requires no install (portable)

anything else im missing?

you could just take my portable powershell script as it does this for you, it can be run standalone or converted to exe, it just currently requires the internet to download files etc, which only takes a few seconds to run

portable also means "leaves no changes on the system"
and at least currently where wayk really wants the config files in appdata or programdata, this is somewhere between not easy and impossible (not your fault obviously tho)

basically an exe which can be used with branding, config and stuff, but can be discarded just by deleting that exe (and maybe the temp files but they wouldnt affect anything)

ok thats possible,

i have looked into the powershell docs and currently i use the Start-Process to run the wayknow exe but it will continue onto the next step

HOWEVER you can add the -Wait command to the Start-Process which does as it says on the tin, its waits until the program finishes BEFORE it carrys on with your script

SO you could use that then after the wayknow exe has been closed, the script would remove all files from places then it will close your built exe

i will do more testing for you and let you know how i progress :)

Hi,

ok some progress today,

ive made a build.ps1 script which does the following (will upload when i get chance and im sure it fully works)

1. takes the branding.zip and base64 encodes it
2. creates a new portable.ps1 script file with the branding.zip embedded
3. uses ps2exe to convert the portable.ps1 to portable.exe

when you run the portable.exe,

1. it then decodes the embedded base64 branding.zip and save the files into the users %appdata%\wayknow folder
2. downloads the portable exe from devolutions directly into the users temp %temp% and then runs the file
3. once you close the wayknow.exe, it then removes the %appdata%\wayknow folder and the wayknow.exe from %temp%

i couldnt embed the wayknow.exe because ps2exe keeps crashing because of a memory limit
if you can get the wayknow.exe under 4MB, i can embed that too!

hope this is good news for everyone :)