More Info

Continue reading for a more thorough list of the data collected and benefits provided by the PSMANAGE scripts…

  1. Computers list provides useful information, such as…
    1. Details about operating systems and service packs are deployed.
    2. Details about hardware models that are deployed.
    3. IP addresses and subnets currently being used.
    4. Inactive computers, candidates for removal.
  2. Disks list provides useful information, such as…
    1. What drives exist on each computer.
    2. Computers that are running low on free disk space.
    3. Total capacity and used space on the systems.
  3. Products list provides useful information, such as…
    1. Full list of installed software on each computer.
    2. Provides a full index of software deployed throughout the environment.
    3. Ability to how many instances of each application are deployed, useful for license utilization.
    4. Product-specific views for monitoring deployment projects.
  4. Certificates list provides useful information, such as…
    1. All computer-level certificates deployed on all systems.
    2. Preemptive view of expiring certificates to enable renewal before they expire, avoiding unexpected outages.
    3. Insight into what subject names / subject alternative names are used throughout the environment.
  5. Users list provides useful information, such as…
    1. Easy views of all users, such as active, inactive, disabled.
    2. Quickly display any users with expired or “never expiring” passwords – useful to remind folks before their password expires.
    3. View users grouped or filtered by any AD metadata, such as by location, department, use or non-use of business system(s) (Exchange, Lync, etc).For example, get a quick list of all users that are enabled on Lync with/without phone numbers, etc…
    4. Many auditor requests can be met with this list, such as all users created or disabled in a specific time-frame, etc.
    5. Email usage views to gain insight on Exchange resource usage by user mailbox, mailbox database, etc. For example, can preemptively see users that are approaching their mailbox limits, etc…
  6. Packages and Tasks lists provide the ability to deploy software…
    1. Packages is a list of silent install packages you have created.
    2. Tasks assign a package to a computer.
    3. Computers phone home, pick up their tasks, and then install whatever is assigned to them.
  7. Etc…
    1. I’ll list more items hear as I document and/or make more additions to the scripts.

 

The collection of scripts are currently designed with a divide and conquer approach. There are client-side scripts, and then there are server-side scripts. Regardless of where the scripts are running, the information they gather is stored in a single SharePoint workspace for ease of access.

  1. The server takes care of any tasks that require elevated permissions throughout the network, such as enumerating information from Active Directory or deploying client-side scripts to new workstations.
  2. The workstations do as much of the “heavy lifting” as possible, to avoid a server bottleneck. and to enable them to “phone home” whenever they are connected as opposed to a server having to continuously try and reach them.
  3. SharePoint presents the content, allows for easy view creation and filtering, makes it easy to export the views to PDF, and also allows for easy manual entry when necessary (creating tasks, for example).

 

The set of actions that are performed by the server and workstations is continually evolving, but at this point I have a good “version one” set of scripts and want to share them up here in case anyone may find them useful.  Shortly I’ll put up a Github URL for downloading the scripts, which you can deploy quickly in any environment 🙂

 

Check out the other pages related to these PSMANAGE scripts…

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