Computer Accounts and Inactive Computers For Active Directory Software for Windows

FactotumNOW IT Management Repository
$549 - Neu Telekommunikationstechnik

The program helps IT departments with change, incident, purchase, and dependency management. FactotumNOW integrates into existing availability monitoring (HP SIM and GFI NSM) and monitors availability itself. It generates disk growth prognostics, allows for close customer interaction through e-mail and a web frontend, includes a knowledge base solution (that assists during incident management), and asset management functionality (based on data collection of Active Directory, WSUS, HP SIM, GFI NSS). It allows you to consolidate data from monitoring tools into a single repository database and enforces workflows (such as manager's approval for change requests). It includes a PHP frontend for submission of requests to the IT department. IT accesses the repository through a GUI client. All repository data is stored in PostgreSQL. A robust engine automates the data collection and the availability monitoring. As optional features, you can run storage analysis agents on your file servers and analyze your IIS web traffic in detail.

Key benefits:
- Small installation effort: Configure modules selectively as you need them when you want to start using them!
- Complete IT Management Solution: FactotumNOW IT Repository is a complete solution for managing and supporting your IT infrastructure!
- Achieves a high Return on Investment: Low TCO bundled with an extensive feature list maximizes your ROI!
- Scalability and Flexibility: Deploy only the modules you need!
- Way beyond just an inventory: The synchronization engines will ensure your data remains relevant and accurate!
- Integrates with your existing tools: Connectors to important tools on your network will ensure you see everything in a single dashboard!

Asset Management: Fully automated collection and update of data through a robust synchronization engine from these sources: Microsoft® Active Directory® computer accounts, Microsoft® Exchange 2000/2003 mailbox attributes and email addresses and Microsoft® WSUS.

---

---

Accounts Receivable
$899 - Markosoft Inc

The Markosoft Accounts Receivable application has everything you need for maintaining all of your accounts for retail sales of merchandise purchased on time. Log and track all transactions, assess late fees, create past due notices, and print out a variety of reports including client address labels and status reports with this all encompassing and versatile package.

Special features such as the ability to amortize payments and automatically assess sales taxes are included in the base package. A full accounting ledger is available for logging transactions and applicable late fees can be automatically calculated and assessed by means of some of the Accounts Receivables built in features.

Late notices can be printed using the included default notices or custom notices can be produced by the user with templates created via Microsoft Word. By using special keywords explained in the help files, these custom notices can be altered to meet all of the specific needs of your business.

If your business does repair or service work, the Work Orders portion of the program can be used to track the progress of work in process. The Work Orders component includes the ability to generate work orders and invoices as well as providing a means of tracking parts inventories via a perpetual inventory system. This module may also be used as a stand alone application that is completely separate from the main Accounts Receivable module so that the program can be placed on individual technician's computers.

---

---

Lock My Computer
$49.95 - PC-Safety

Lock My Computer is a powerful desktop security solution for personal or publicly accessible computers running the Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 Operating Systems. It disallows unauthorized changes to various settings of the Windows system, such as Control Panel, Desktop, Local Security Policies, Outlook Express account settings, and many more others. It can disable access to local hard disks, Floppy, CDROM, and removable drives or make them read-only. By locking and hiding or making read-only of programs, files, and folders, Lock My Computer can prevent them from being launched, modified or deleted. Lock My Computer supports creating unlimited number of user accounts with each one has his own password and protection list.

---

ActiveExit XP
$29.95 - WinAbility Software Corporation

If you are an administrator of a computer site, and other users often forget to log off from their accounts when they leave the computers, you can set up ActiveExit to log off such users automatically after a period of inactivity. ActiveExit can not only logoff the inactive user, but also shut down or hibernate the computer, as well as lock the workstation, provided that the computer itself supports such operations. Even if a user has locked the computer, or if no user is logged on to Windows, ActiveExit can shutdown or hibernate the computer after the idle period you set up, to conserve energy and reduce the wear of the computer components. If other users of your computer often shutdown it unnecessarily, you can stop them from using the shutdown command by configuring ActiveExit to protect that command with a password. You can also set up ActiveExit to run a program before exiting Windows, to, for instance, backup your data, or clean up your hard disk automatically at the end of the work day.

Windows XP allows the administrators to restrict the logon hours for certain users, but it does not provide a way to forcefully log the users off Windows when the allowed hours end. ActiveExit XP can help you overcome this limitation: you can use it to set up a weekly schedule of the allowed hours, and ActiveExit will not only prevent users from logging on during the denied hours, but it will also log them off automatically when the allowed time ends. You may find this feature of ActiveExit useful if you are a parent and your kids spend too much time with the computer playing games or chatting with buddies. You yourself can continue using the computer at any time by overriding the ActiveExit function by entering a password you can set up.

---

ITPro ToolKit
$79 - Absolute Dynamics

Quickly search Active Directory for users and computers and manage them across the network. IT support tools are centralized into one utility that can administer users and computers in your Active Directory. Search by the display name, username or computer name. Reset passwords, enable or disable accounts, add or remove users from groups, manage computers over the network and much more...

---

ProfileLink
$0 - Heptagon Software Solutions

ProfileLink is an application designed to help laptop users easily use their computer at different locations. When using a laptop computer at different locations, e.g. office, home and travelling may require the user to make different kinds of selections when launching applications. When the user logs on to the computer ProfileLink will start automatically and launch the applications that the user has assigned to the current hardware profile. ProfileLink will also set up the users default printer depending on hardware profile. If the user changes the default printer ProfileLink will register this and use this setting the next time the user logs on using the same hardware profile. As an example we can take a look at how to use a mail client. E.g. when using the computer in the office the user will normally use the company’s mail server, but when using the computer at home or while travelling the user might use the mail server of some ISP. Prior to ProfileLink there ware several ways to accomplish this, but none of them ware fully automatic. One way to do it could be to let the user select the profile when the mail client was launched, another could be to create a number of batch files that the user could invoke depending on his or her current location. The last method we will mention here is one that seems to be widely used and it relies on creating multiple user-accounts for the same user and letting the user select the account matching the location, e.g. Lisa would have three accounts, Lisa (Office), Lisa (Home) and Lisa (Travelling). The problem with this solution is that if Lisa installs a new program in the office account it will not be available in the two other accounts. With ProfileLink it is possible to configure which parameters a specific application should be launched with depending on the current location. Instead of using different user-accounts for the same user ProfileLink relies on multiple hardware profiles.

---