Customizing Pulse Desktop Client

Customizing Pulse Desktop Client Overview

The Pulse Desktop Client (Pulse Client) customization tool BrandPackager enables you to customize the appearance of the Pulse Client for Windows and Apple OS X. You can add your own identity graphic to the Pulse Client splash screen, to the program interface, and to Windows credential provider tiles. Figure 107 shows graphic customizations applied to the Pulse Client for Windows. You can also customize error and informational message text, the text that appears in dialog boxes and on buttons, and make limited changes to Pulse Client online Help. For example, you might want to add your help desk phone number to Pulse Client error messages and the Pulse Client online Help.

BrandPackager is available for download at: https://ladc.pulsesecure.net/psladc/#/section/software-download/download.

BrandPackager runs on Windows only, but you use it to create the package files for Pulse Client for Windows and Pulse Client for OS X. A package file contains your edits to Pulse Client resource files. The edited resource files are installed into a special folder on the client. When Pulse Client needs to access a particular file, it checks this special folder first and uses the file if it is present. If Pulse Client does not find the file there, it uses the file that resides in the normal Pulse Client resource file location.

For Windows, you deploy the package to endpoints and use an MSIEXEC command-line installation option to instruct the installation program to apply your package file on the endpoint. For OS X, you copy the package file, the Pulse Client installation program, and a script file from the BrandPackager file set to an OS X computer, and then use them to add the package file to the Pulse Client installation file.

You can apply your changes to new or upgrade installations. You can also apply your customizations to an existing Pulse Client installation without installing or upgrading Pulse Client. Your changes to the Pulse Client user interface, message text, and online Help persist through normal client software upgrades.

BrandPackager Usage Notes:

•BrandPackager supports Pulse Client for Windows and Pulse Client for macOS.

•BrandPackager is compatible with Pulse Client R5.0 or later.

•Pulse Client customizations cannot be installed through Ivanti Web portal (server) installations.

•When you edit Pulse Client resource files, you must preserve the UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 files include 3 bytes {0xEF, 0xBB, 0xBF}, the Byte Order Mark (BOM), at the beginning of the file.

•The Pulse Client interface and the online Help include separate resource files for each of the supported languages. If you make a change in the English file, you should make the same change in the files for the other languages that you support in your environment. If you do not do so, then the edited English version is always used.

•Pulse Client online Help can include new information with each new release. If you edit a Help topic, your changes are retained during a Pulse Client upgrade. However, if Ivanti changes that topic in the new release, that new information will not be available, because your edited topic will be used instead. For this reason we recommend that you make only limited changes to the online Help. For example, you can change the topic that describes how to contact customer support to direct users to contact your own help desk.