Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s our latest rugged series dropping near you from… the sky? Well, they might as well be falling and dropping near you left and right, because our rugged devices are built and used in a different way than a classic laptop. Designed to survive the elements, these PCs are used on drilling platforms, ships, during military operations and in extreme heat or cold environments. Even if you are rolling in a forklift, truck or ambulance we got the right vehicle dockings on which you can easily mount these devices. You get it, we can go on and on. But let’s just say that these bad boys really underline the “anywhere” in “work from anywhere”. So, the gloves are off, these laptops are ready to rumble. Let’s take a look at what makes these devices amazing. (But just so you know, if you insist on keeping your gloves on, that’s fine as well as they are equipped with a glove-capable touchscreen.)
Of course, it’s the hardware design that takes these devices to the next level. Both our latest Latitude 7330 and 5430 are tested to the MIL-STD-810H specs and have an IP-65 and IP-53 rating respectively. By now it’s probably clear that there is no such thing as “standard” in the rugged world. The same goes for the applications that are installed. And since bad user experiences are our kryptonite, it is crucial that these devices can also be individually adjusted in their operation. That’s exactly why we equip them with our Rugged Control Center.
The Rugged Control Center brings the tasks of the user to the foreground and makes them more easily accessible. We’re talking about things like using the camera as a barcode reader, GPS and activating or deactivating the wireless connection, simply by configurating the programmable buttons. Now if I’ve caught you in the process of raising your eyebrow because your skeptical about factory installed software, be reassured that the Rugged Control Center has a minimal footprint with no impact on system performance. Now moving on from the technicalities, let’s dive in and see what this software has to offer.
- The dashboard gives you an overview of the various control settings and system information. Via the arrow buttons, you can also see the current configuration settings of the screen menus.
- The program tab shows you all options to configure the left, right, top, and bottom menus and how to activate them. When you‘re configuring a rugged tablet, then you will see some additional programmable buttons. They can be configured here as well, nice right?
- The feature list gives you an alternative way to configure the menus and settings by offering direct shortcuts to the different settings.
- Finally, The settings menu will allow you to configure the Rugged control center and device functions.
And just as you thought it couldn’t get better, we haven’t even discussed how easy it is to centrally manage all of this functionality. For an IT administrator, the magic formula for a world with perfectly managed end-points usually doesn’t consist of sugar, spice and everything nice, but only has two ingredients: centrality and uniformity. That’s exactly why we have an extra feature in house: an admin can start the Rugged Control Center with an additional option to have a Policy tab.
- Launch Dell Rugged Control Center in Policy-mode by opening a Command Prompt.
- Enter start dellrcc:policy at the command line
The application will now restart, but this time it will also include the policy tab. With this tab, you as an admin can determine exactly which options you leave to the choice of the end user and what things you want to keep effectively centrally managed. Once you’ve made your choices, you simply click on Download Policy, to create a blueprint of your configuration that is then downloaded in a %userprofile%\Downloads\Dell Rugged Control Center\RCCPolicySettingsProfile.json file.
To install the group policy object template, follow the next steps:
- Run the RccGpo.msi installer file.
- By default, the installer is installed to %programfiles%\Dell\Rugged Control Center\gpo.
- You can move this template to %systemroot%\policydefinitions (local machine) or %systemroot% \sysvol\domain\policies\PolicyDefinitions (domain controller) based on your requirement.
- Open the downloaded policy .json file from %userprofile%\Downloads\Dell Rugged Control Center\RCCPolicySettingsProfile.json.
- Copy the content and paste it into the policy inside the Rugged Control Center template (inside the GPO editor).
- To impose the policy on client machines that do not belong to any domain, or select to use GPO policies, copy the json file to the directory of each client machine. The default directory location of the client machine is %program files%\dell\Rugged Control Center.
If you’re curious to discover more we can highly recommend our latest unboxing video where we introduce the two newest additions to the rugged portfolio.