MQC Client

Introduction

The Mercury Quality Center(MQC) web plugin stopped working with IE8 in its out-of-the-box configuration, causing lot of its users pain. The problem is that IE8 is built for a safer browsing experience and therefore does not load legacy plugins such as the MQC as it deems it to be a vulnerable component.

This is where MQC Client comes in. It is a lightweight program specifically written to host such legacy components and therefore is capable of loading and hosting the MQC web plugin. But that's not all -- using MQC Client is far more efficient than using a reconfigured Internet Explorer as the following section explains.

Benefits

Though an HTML control hosted in a proprietary binary, MQC Client offers some significant advantages over using regular Internet Explorer for the same purpose:

• Significantly reduced footprint: Activating Internet Explorer would load all the registered and active addons. Being a pure HTML control hosted in a window, MQC Client does not load any of the IE addons and therefore has a smaller resource footprint. And because of the same reason, it also loads a lot faster.
• Uncompromised security: Using a separate program lets you leave the Internet Explorer security settings intact (changes to which are otherwise necessary to make it load the MQC plugin) making standard browsing more secure. Admittedly, more and more people are using Chrome and Firefox for their general browsing, but there will be occasions when you are forced to use IE as some websites are still not truly cross-browser compatible. And when you do that, you want to be using IE with all its safety features turned on.
• Easy navigation: MQC Client detects logons to MQC domains and projects, retrieves this information and displays them in the program's titlebar. This makes it easy to Alt+Tab navigate between different active MQC Client sessions each logged on to a different project.

Usage

When activating it for the first time on a computer, it needs to be run with Administrator privileges. This is to allow proper download and registration of the MQC web plugin. This is a one off step that needs to be done only once per machine.

If you're logged on as a normal user (that is, without Administrator privileges), and activate the program for the first time on a computer, you'll be prompted to run the program with Administrator privileges. Note that when running as an Administrator, the program monitors the plugin registration progress and detects successful completion of this step. Once the registration is successfully completed, it saves a flag to the registry thereby preventing subsequent display of this prompt, even when run from a normal user account. Conversely, if the registration process was not successfully completed, the prompt will be displayed every time you activate the program.

Also, during first activation you will be prompted to input the Mercury Quality Control web access URL. This URL is saved to the registry and used for all subsequent program sessions preventing further such prompts. If you need to update this URL afterwards, you can do it through the Server URL dialog accessible from the File menu.

For the curious, the relevant registry entries are maintained under the key SOFTWARE\MQCClient. The successful plugin registration status flag is stored under the hive HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and the server URL is stored under the hive HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Installation

It's packaged as a single executable file and does not require an installer. Place it wherever you like and activate it by running the binary.

Download

You can download it from here.