Last fall I demonstrated an HTA I had developed to rapidly develop a user logon script with practically no scripting. You could map drives and printers based on group membership simply be selecting a group from a pre-populated drop down list. You could display a message to the user with information just as a summary of their mapped resources or how old their password is. You could even run additional programs or code.
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The only thing you really have to do is provide a text list of shared drives and printers that you want to map. The new version let's you specify the location of those files.
- Other items in the new version:
- Fixed bug when using %username% in the drive mapping.
- Previous used values are stored in the registry for faster access.
- Added popup help.
- Added ability to load welcome and error messages from files.
- Added a debug feature.
- Added option to load finished script in Notepad or PrimalScript (if installed).
I have some screen shots of the latest version at http://www.jdhitsolutions.com/logonscriptgen/index.htm.
The latest version is also now a free PrimalScript scripting tool. You can download the latest version at http://www.primalscript.com/freetools/.
Now you can script without scripting! I hope you'll let me know what you think.
Technorati tags: scripting, HTA, logon, SAPIEN, Network, Primalscript
Looks like I missed something as I haven’t seen your script. It sounds very interesting. There were times when I was playing with scripting pretty frequently. I enjoyed it as I liked creating things myself. However, this activity was consuming most of my time. And, this was on my former job, and I ran into problems with the project I ran. We failed to complete the project in time because of an awful bug we made in several scripts that we put into production. I learned that programming is good when you need to tweak some settings so that the final configuration to reflect the specifics of the project or task you are implementing now. But it could be a nightmare and may account for the delayed release of the main project. The problem here is that few tools are powerful enough to provide for both flexibility and feature-richness. Most of the tools I’ve seen were more development environments and required that I get more into programming then focusing on the main task. Obviously, I wanted to concentrate on network administration rather than on implementing standalone applications. Finally, I found the tool that I am currently using for configuring everything I need to provide for a user to work within our domain. That’s Desktop Authority from Scriptlogic. I configure everything I used to configure using scripts and even more. I don’t really need to concentrate on the banal tasks like drive mapping, mailbox configuration and setting up Outlook profile settings. I used to use a ton of supplementary tool s to configure all that with the scripts. But now that I simply don’t need it anymore as everything I do can be managed from that management console. That allows me to focus more on complex configuration procedures, the network topology we are using, the applications and the hardware we use there. I even don’t think about problems connected with profiles getting corrupted when I use shadowing with our terminal server farm. I simply don’t differentiate the configuration task that I do for my physical environment from the operations I need to perform to configure thin clients. Thank you Jeff for your help with scripting. I’ve learned from you a lot, although don’t pretend to be a good scripting guy.
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Paul.
I know Desktop Authority has its place and fans. It obviously fills a need and if it gets the job done so you can go home, that’s all that matters.