Useful Tools
Vmware Stuff
This little tool is great it sits in your taskbar and pops up a balloon when an alarm on virtualcenter is triggered. Very useful when you want to notified of problems when you are not necessarily looking at the vi client.
This is a powershell script which determines the health for your single ESX server or virtualcenter cluster, on execution of the script it creates a simple website that displays data such as if there are any active snapshots, cd-drives/floppies connected. It also shows you information about the connected datastores and also individual vm’ states amongst other things. I find this script is useful to look at if you are scheduling any kind of overnight maintenance as the output of the script will show you most of the vm migration showstoppers which would be required to put hosts into maintenance mode.
This add on allows you to run commands to virtualcenter through powershell.
Microsoft Stuff
If your studying or just working on MS systems then this is an absolute essential purchase, for less than the cost of a windows 7 ultimate licence a year you get access to pretty much all the software MS has ever made (full blown as well not just evals).
Novell stuff
This util allows you too run reports on any attribute that your Edirectory tree has, these reports can be exported as csv/xls/txt etc.
This is a remote desktop type application for accessing Netware Servers, and also has a drop down menu for accessing the various console screens within each server. definately a cool tool!
Generic Tools
I came across this tool very recently whilst contemplating a rather laborious task of installing a program (only available in exe) that had no msi compacted and no iss file in it. This little tool allows you to script button clicks of program installations, it does way more than this but I was only interested in this feature. It enabled me to script a roll out of said program to around 50 users (no admin rights) through our currently native zenworks features. Very cool and very quick as well.
This tool allows you to run programs etc as another user (mostly for administrator access). This is effectively a more intelligent Runas tool, which allows you to store the administrator password in an encoded file. Whilst yes the encoding can be broken it stops the password etc from being displayed in a batch file for example in clear text which is very handy.
This is a great free tool allowing install-less remote administration of any computer (think logmein rescue and you get the idea). This tool is completely free for personal or business use so I use it both for home and work. The way it works is the expert has a client installed and the person requiring assistance goes to join.mikogo.com. The user is presented with a nice simple page requiring only a session ID and the persons name. Now the mikogo client that the expert has installed can be set up for either screen sharing with the expert or to control the users computer. The expert just right clicks on the mikogo client and chooses “create session” and gives the session ID to the user to enter into the webpage.
Colabaration tools
This is a cool platform definately worth a mention as its a corporate messaging server only free! This is a windows installer that allows you to intergrate it with Active Directory for easy administration and also co-developed with a Instant Messenging client called Spark, Both work very nicely together as an instant messaging platform although I must say in my tests I’ve carried out so far on various installations the voice chat is a little picky (sometimes it works sometimes not). Overall though if you want Instant Messaging in your organisation (if you have small branch offices and can do with reducing the telephony bill for example) then this is the kiddy for you.
Big blue button is an opensource conferencing platform that allows all the usual goodies you get with conferencing products (upload office docs to present/video/voice conferening), is a very cool platform to work with although the only thing I would say as a non developer the only way you can configure the home screen is by installing a CMS (wordpress,drupal etc) and using one of their plugin’s to create meeting rooms and front page branding.