Scripting

Lync and fortunes

By Alexander Trofimov

“Parachute for sale. Only used once, never opened, small stain” “Life is tough. Get a helmet” “I don’t have a smart phrase to share with you” Some people love to put sentences like these in their messenger. I, for sure, do. In case of OCS, you could do it manually. But really, only one message of the day? Boooooring (catchphrase: “Somebody’s boring me … I think it’s me. ”), especially if you have collected lots of them. Changing them manually, almost as boring as not changing them. Spend some time to create a small program for that: that’s how we, … Continue reading Lync and fortunes

BITS Transfer PowerShell cmdlets

By Alexander Trofimov

One friend of mine told me that I shouldn’t have spread knowledge about BITSAdmin command while there was the PowerShell cmdlets in place. Well, to some extent he is definitely right: 1) PowerShell is better self-documented. 2) It is waaaay easier to script with. 3) It is more simple to use in some basic situations like “just give me that darn file”. 4) Many people just like PoSh. So, the tasks I did in my post about BITSAdmin seems to be done in one command: Start-BitsTransfer –source <URL> –destination <PathToFile> but one need to do his homework better: Seems like … Continue reading BITS Transfer PowerShell cmdlets

How to change attribute in AD: alternatives #2

By Alexander Trofimov

Returning to the question of AD attributes change tools I should go on for some more graphical tools. From now on I know only some self-created possibilities, which require some coding. First is to create some Custom GUI Application There are multitudes of variants: C#, VBScript, C, you name it. Being somewhat lazy, I decided to take a short cut. In a beautiful book from Windows 2008 resource kit, namely: Windows Administration Resource Kit, there are some useful additions. Among them there is an .HTA script, named “Object_Attribute_EmployeeNumber.hta”. It allows me to show EmployeeNumber attribute and set it. As we … Continue reading How to change attribute in AD: alternatives #2

DPM: Scripting Additions to a Backup

By Alexander Trofimov

It’s beautiful when we are able to use features of DPM to backup an application as a whole (say, SharePoint or Hyper-V virtual machine), but what will happen when it is not enough to just copy files and system state (like in OCS in some cases, or Windows Server 2008 BMR Backup), or our MOSS 2007 farm configured in a way we can’t backup it at once (some SQL mirroring scenarios prevent us from doing so)? Well… It is where scripting steps in.  DPM actually lets us to run any script before backup starts or after it finishes. Is it … Continue reading DPM: Scripting Additions to a Backup

Ready for 2010 Scripting Games? Prepare!

By Alexander Trofimov

The Games’ organizers  have issued the list of skills necessary (Hey! No one told you the skills are sufficient 😉 ,,) for you to successfully pass through the Games’ tasks. Thus, what do you need to be ready: 1) Working with the registry 2) Event log 3) Text files and folders 4) Environment variables 5) WMI 6) Looping 7) Special folders 8) Arrays 9) Functions and subroutines 10) Errors handling 11) Graphical sccripting On first sight it is such a list! But even a scripting newbie will learn a lot from the learning materials’ links which given by the organizers  … Continue reading Ready for 2010 Scripting Games? Prepare!