DeskNow Knowledge Base > Custom login page

DeskNow version: 2.4 and later

It is possible to customize the login page of DeskNow.

To simply change the logo that appears in the page, login as admin and see Administration/Branding
To completely change the page, edit the file /webapps/desknow/jsp/original/Login_default.jsp
Pay close attention to preserve the javascript code and all the fields in the form.
To put the login box inside another page (ex your portal's home): include the following code:

Password encryption, and login from a link

The previous method sends the password in cleartext. This could be a security risk. DeskNow supports three forms of password encryption. The most secure, and used by default, is MD5 hashing. Then there is 3DES with a server-generated key. This is less secure than MD5, but necessary in some cases when using an external authentication plugin. These two methods are not easily usable if you want to have a custom login page. The third available method is 3DES with client generated key.

See example below:

<html>
<body>
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://www.server.com/desknow/3.0.11javascript/des.js"></script>
<script language="JavaScript">
function doDeskNowLogin(username,password) {
var ltoken="09DFGTREJKLOPAFDGH98KJWE"; // can be any random string 24 characters long. It can be dynamically generated
var ep=desknowEncrypt(ltoken,password);
var lurl="http://www.server.com/desknow/home.do?Action=Login&LoginToken="+escape(ltoken)+"&encryption=u3des&hp="+ep+"&username="+escape(username);

// note: you can easily change the code to return the URL for future use, instead of launching it immediately.
// return lurl;

window.location=lurl;
}
</script>
<form>
<input type=text name="username"><br/>
<input type=password name="password"><br/>
<input type=button value="Login" onClick="doDeskNowLogin(this.form.username.value,this.form.password.value);">
</form>
</body>
</html>

You need to change www.server.com with the correct URL for your DeskNow server (in 2 locations in the code). Also make sure to use the appropriate version number of DeskNow (3.0.11 in this case). To avoid having to change this every time yuou upgrade DeskNow, consider copying the des.js file to a fixed location.

Note that it is also possible to have a single link that logs the user into DeskNow, without having to input data in a form appositely. This is especially useful when integrating DeskNow into a portal, where the user has already logged in. To do so, simply alter the doDeskNowLogin() javascript function to return the appropriate URL instead of launching it (see comment in the code).