snagrat Posted March 11, 2017 Posted March 11, 2017 Activman - automatically extracts users from SIMS and creates their AD account for you including shares etc..... saves so much time and very cheap! That looks very good. Is it each to setup and tweak?
Liam Posted March 12, 2017 Posted March 12, 2017 Salamander is the best money I have spent in years. It's gone from being a user management tool to us using it to automate loads of other stuff. It's just awesome
Mistert89 Posted March 12, 2017 Posted March 12, 2017 We're drifting away from ActivMan as it does become flaky at times wrt permissions and leavers/rejoiners (such as Supply staff). We've budgeted for Salamander from April.
mavhc Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 ...and the custom launcher I wrote for TightVNC. It never sat well with me deploying VNC to staff computers, so I made a launcher for it in VB .Net 2010. Goes something like this: Copies TightVNC server exe to client via the admin share Creates a random password for the connection Writes registry keys on target computer for TightVNC Register the exe as a service and starts it, set to manual start Opens the viewer on your computer and connects When the viewer is closed it will wipe all remnants of VNC off of the target machine In the event the connection is severed before cleanup commences a script is placed in startup that will clean it up I wrote it a number of years and order of things probably escapes me now. I wrote it to work with Windows 7, but it and the version of TightVNC I have rolled into it work on 10. It has been a lifesaver over the years and I even used it this morning. Would be great to see this published on github or similar
fiza Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 Salamander is the best money I have spent in years. It's gone from being a user management tool to us using it to automate loads of other stuff. It's just awesome What else are you using it for?
Mozzy12 Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 +1 for Salamander. Automated user creation directly from SIMS is heaven for the summer intake. If you use Office365 its worth having a look at the stuff they are doing with SharePoint automation too. Total no-brainer to renew each year for me!
AJWhite1970 Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 Can someone let me know either here or via PM what the rough cost of Salamandar is for the AD tools? (no 365 or anything else fancy...) Ta
DarrenShan Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 Another +1 for Salamander - their support is the best I've ever known, so responsive and helpful.
DarrenShan Posted March 13, 2017 Posted March 13, 2017 Another +1 for Salamander - their support is the best I've ever known, so responsive and helpful.
ITBadger Posted March 21, 2017 Posted March 21, 2017 +1 for Salamander here. Also check out Senso if you are in that particular market.
Danp Posted March 21, 2017 Posted March 21, 2017 Can someone let me know either here or via PM what the rough cost of Salamandar is for the AD tools? (no 365 or anything else fancy...) Ta And here too if someone does not mind. Thank you.
thimon Posted March 21, 2017 Author Posted March 21, 2017 And here too if someone does not mind. Thank you. I was quoted £1678.80 inc VAT for the AD annual license and installation.
Danp Posted March 21, 2017 Posted March 21, 2017 I was quoted £1678.80 inc VAT for the AD annual license and installation. Thank you
karldenton Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 Netsupport DNA Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Manager 1
Blue_Cookeh Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 Royal TS: https://www.royalapplications.com/ts/win/features There's dozens of us I tell you! +1 for it though, it's so god damn helpful.
tinca492 Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 I find MS Project (£50 per user )invaluable for all but the smallest project, probably only use about 10% of its features, but a huge time saver, also impresses the bosses when they walk in my room and see project plans, Gannt charts etc on the wall. I also use MS Visio (£40 per user) extensively for network mapping, floor plans, org charts etc. It has superb Layer functionality and actually handles Autocad files quite well. Teamviewer is my best friend as it only costs about £380 pa for one technician and unlimited endpoints. 1
ledow2 Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 Sorry to play devil's advocate: Am I the only one to not use any of this expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things? AD user creation? Done by Powershell. £2k to do a one-time user creation of a list of users seems inherently overzealous. And en-route it populates our access control and other systems that can't auto-sync and which no specialist software would support without bespoke coding anyway. Helpdesk/Asset/Inventory? GLPI or a thousand free equivalents. Teamviewer? Really? Visio / Project is okay, I suppose, but only for one user seems a waste of buying a special tool just for that, and more than one user seems too expensive. I'm pretty sure over 15 years, I've never bought anything software "just for IT" (ICT as a subject, yes, of course, IT deployed out to every user, sure. IT as in the department? No). I'm reminded of https://xkcd.com/1205/ and there's a point at which money-saves-time but, honestly, even creating/syncing 1500 users is a one-off job executed once a year? Spend half a day writing / stealing a script to do it and keep a copy if you change schools. £2k is a month's wages of a technician, at least, and they could sit and type that data in inside a month, let alone copy/paste or come up with an automated method. We're not "cheap" when it comes to the right tools and the stuff to support what's in school, but I can't name a thing software-wise that I would need enough to pay for it to run the IT department side of things. The nearest I ever got was Exchange email signatures, until I found the right GPO/script/Word template combination to automatically handle it for me and stop users changing it, and that's not even something that applies to any-other-way of sending email from a school account (which all have nice configuration options). Maybe it's just me?
DJ-1701 Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 Sorry to play devil's advocate: Am I the only one to not use any of this expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things? No, but then again that's not what this topic is about. Quite a few of us here us PowerShell (and previously vbs scripts and batch files) to create users, send out password reset reminders, update teachers about new starters. Or even in house PHP code and MySQL databases for Helpdesk systems. Though it's all about what your skills are and if you have the time to implement and support it. 1
mjk Posted April 5, 2017 Posted April 5, 2017 Sorry to play devil's advocate: Am I the only one to not use any of this expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things?AD user creation? Done by Powershell. It looks like you do use expensive pay-for stuff for IT-only things !! Surely you don't need to pay for expensive windows computers, CALs and resource hungry windows servers to run all of that when you could do it free with linux on cheaper hardware... /sorry to play devils advocate.
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