You might find it useful to develop your own Microsoft Visual Basic scripts to perform configuration tasks, run queries, or administer various servers in your test or production Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) environments. For example, you might want to do any of the following:
- Verify whether a user migration to Active Directory was
successful - You can write a script that performs a query that
enumerates all user accounts and group memberships in a specified
Active Directory domain.
- Verify status of provisioned shares - You can write a
script that you run periodically for maintenance purposes to query
for the names and status of all shares on a specified
server.
- Verify free disk space - You might want to write a
script that returns actual free disk space on specified servers
running Microsoft SQL Server or on Web servers in your provisioning
environment, so you can monitor the consumption of disk resources
as you provision hosted data and Web services to
customers.
- Create XML requests - You can write a script that calls
the methods of the XML Document Object Model (DOM) to create XML
provisioning requests that you can send to MPS.
To perform tasks such as these, you will need to learn about scripting technologies such as Microsoft Windows Script Host (WSH), Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). With these technologies, you can create administrative scripts that perform a vast array of tasks including:
- Managing users, groups, computers, and security in Active
Directory
- Administering Web servers, databases, DNS, and
registries
- Monitoring performance
- Managing disks
- Managing files, folders, and shares on any computer
For more information see:
- Script Center on TechNet to download scripting
resources and tools, in addition to sample scripts that perform
tasks such as those indicated earlier.
- Scripting on Microsoft Developer Network
(MSDN) to find additional Windows scripting resources,
documentation, and downloads.