Customizing the Support Center option

When users run Parallels Desktop Business Edition, they can get support at any time by clicking the Help > Support Center menu. By default, this will open one of the following:

  • If you are a large organization with your own Help Desk, the menu will open a message box saying that the user should contact the system administrator for assistance.
  • If you are a small organization without a Help Desk or if you are using a trial version of Parallels Desktop, the menu will open the Parallels Desktop support web page.

You can change the default behavior described above and make the Help > Support Center menu open a custom URL, such as your corporate Help Desk page or any other web page that you desire.

The customization can be done during mass deployment of Parallels Desktop by modifying the corresponding deployment configuration parameter. Please see Configure deployment configuration options for the complete info (see the description of the Help and Support section of the configuration file).

You can also make the customization manually on an individual Mac as follows:

  1. Log in to the Mac.
  2. In the Finder, navigate to the /Users/<User_Name>/Library/Preferences directory and locate the com.parallels.Parallels Desktop.plist file.
  3. Open the file using the Property List Editor application, which is included with Xcode.
  4. Find the SupportRequestUrl property in the file. If the property doesn't exist, add it to the file specifying its data type as String.
  5. To specify the action that should be performed by the Help > Support Center menu, set the value of the SupportRequestUrl property:
    • To display the default text message, clear the property value.
    • To open a URL, specify the full URL to the desired Web page or a resource.
Was this topic helpful?