Using Custom Graphics and Links in the Control Center

Parallels Desktop Control Center is a part of the Parallels Desktop graphical user interface. It's a window from which a Mac user launches virtual machines. By default, the Control Center displays the list of the available virtual machines, as in the following example:

You can customize the Control Center by specifying a URL to your own HTML document, which will be embedded at the top of the Control Center window. The HTML page can contain text, graphics, and links such as your company logo, custom text, a link to a support page, etc. The HTML document format doesn't have any specific requirements.

The URL must be specified during the preparation stage of the Mass Deployment process. Specifically, you need to specify the URL and the HTML page size using the following variables in the mass deployment configuration file (deploy.cfg):

• control_center_banner_url
• control_center_banner_height
• control_center_banner_min_width

For the description of how to specify the values, please see Configure Deployment Configuration Options. The variables are described in the Virtual Machines section.

The following is an example of Parallels Desktop Control Center displaying a custom banner at the top.

You can download a sample HTML document defining the banner using the following URL:

http://download.parallels.com/desktop/tools/header13.zip