Greg—featured in Thomas Lee's article in July 2002 issue of Enterprise System Magazine

"Microsoft MVP Greg Chapman has suggested that humble
Microsoft word is possibly the best tool for remote admin."

Word as a management tool? Greg Chapman, another Microsoft MVP, has suggested that humble Microsoft Word is possibly the best tool for remote admin. His justification is this: "All my vital system management is done with scripting at login time, domain and directory management with Word using ADSI, WMI and some shelled WSH scripts. Used properly, this stuff is much more practical than any of the third-party tools. In fact, it was the poor quality of the tools I looked at, coupled with the fact that no one builds a decent IIS synch tool for web farms that aren't on MS clusters, that drove me to look in other avenues. Everything an administrator needs is available in ADSI or WMI. Word is a better place to code these solutions than in WSH environment. The results are excellent." If you are interested in finding out more about this innovative approach, contact Greg directly at greg@mousetrax.com. As an example of the sort of script that you can write, see http://www.reskit.net/scripts/inventory.vb_. Greg's roll you own approach is proof that you don't have to make do with the standard admin tools provided by Microsoft and third parties. There's always scope for individual creativity.