Customer Reviews

Automating Windows Administration

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A major portion of the Total Cost of Ownership of a group of computers is the cost of the sysadmin who has to maintain them. Given Microsoft's dominance of the desktop, this book should be of interest to sysadmins or their supervisors.

A little ironically, the material in the book tends towards a unix-type style of administration. As you may know, historically, unix machines predated any UI, and they still emphasise scripting languages for sysadmins to use and modify. These led to unix sysadmins having very powerful scripts that might be scheduled for regular, automated runs. Well, if you are a Microsoft syadmin, you probably started from and tend to stay within a UI. Which is great for manual tasks. But here, Borge shows how you can hone your skills at the command line, and why this is vital for automating common tasks.

Of course, the book is not entirely about scripting. But I'm giving you the gist. The promise of the book is that it can round out and enhance your skills in this important direction.

Plus the book also opens up another opportunity. If you get comfortable enough at the command line with writing scripts and using them, then a sideways shift into running unix/linux machines is not that difficult. At a fundamental level, the ideas discussed in the book tend to have similar implementations under unix. So the book can expand your career prospects, and not just in the obvious way indicated by the book.

This book is an invaluable resource for Windows Script Host users. It's organized in the cookbook format popularized by O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook. This means that each chapter contains a set of recipes that start with a problem and then walk you through a set of solutions that you can pick from.

An example would be 12.25, "Retrieving an Address Book Recipient". The second first fleshes out the problem. Then provides the code for the solution. That is followed by a discussion session where the design behind the solution and the code that implements the solution is described in more detail.

This format has several advantages. First, you have a handy long-term reference for solving problems in an environment you may not use every day. Second, by reading through the problems and their solutions you can infer solutions to related problems that may not be directly covered in the book. So the book becomes a practical way to expand your knowledge of WSH by learning pragmatic best practice solutions to everyday problems.

I strongly recommend this book to Windows Script Host users.

I think this was related to an earlier APress book: Managing Enterprise Systems with the Windows Script Host, which I have. I was relieved to find it 'updated' with Exchange Server 2003 and Windows 2003 Server which is what I am working on now.

I would recommend this to anyone who is an adminstrator. You can actually use it in your day-to-day tasks. I especially liked automating events like a reminder for the user to change their password after XX number of days.