GUI Operations
When you first launch GPInventory, you'll see a screen that looks like lined notebook paper with three menu choices along the top: File, Query, and Results. Your first step is to define which computers you want to query. Choose one of the Select Computers options from the Query menu. The options are pretty much self-explanatory—you can select computers from an Active Directory (AD) container or from a text file. A file called examplecomputerlist.txt is installed with GPInventory to provide an example of the format used for a text-file–based computer list. Once you've selected a group of computers, they'll be displayed in the main GPInventory window under the Computer column heading.
After specifying the computers from which you wish to gather information, you need to define what information you want to collect from that group of computers. Click the Select Information to Gather item from the Query menu. The Information window will open and let you select the queries you wish to run. You'll notice two categories of queries: RSOP and WMI. To select a query, you first need to highlight the query, then click it again to put a check in its checkbox. This is a bit different from typical checkbox behavior in Windows applications but only takes a second to get used to. Try something simple the first time, such as the RSOP: GPOs applied to computer query and the WMI: Logged on user query, then click OK.
Now you're ready to run your query by pressing F5 or choosing Run Query from the Query menu. The results will be displayed in the main GPInventory window, as shown in Figure 1. The number appearing after the GPO name in each result cell is the registry DWORD representation of the GPO version applied. For example, version one is 65537, version two is 131074 (2 × 65537), version three is 196611 (3 × 65537), and so on.
If you like what you've created, you can save both the results and the query definition. To save the results, choose either the Save to an XML file option or the Save to a text file option from the Results menu. The text file format has tabdelimited values and is easily used in Microsoft Office Excel; XML files can be imported into a database, into Excel 2003, or in the near future, into other Microsoft Office 12 applications.
To save the parameters of your query so that you can easily run it again, choose either Save or Save as from the File menu. Type a meaningful name in the Save dialog box and save your query with an XML extension.
Go ahead and open the query definition file you just created and take a look at its structure and data. You should be able to see pretty quickly how the selections you made are notated within the ManagedObjects and Target sections.
Command-Line Execution
Once you've saved an XML query definition as described above, you've created the recipe for running that query again manually from the GPInventory GUI or via an argument to the command-line version of GPInventory.
GPInventory accepts two arguments—the query file and an output file, in that order. The query file is the XML file that defines the query parameters, and the output file is where the results of the query will be stored. You control the format of the output file by specifying either a .txt or .xml extension on the filename you provide. For example, the command
gpinventory MyQuery.xml
MyOutput.txt
would save the results of the query specified in MyQuery.xml to a tab-delimited file called MyOutput.txt. Keep in mind that you might need to specify paths to the GPInventory executable and query definition if these files aren't located in the folder from which you run the command.
You can use Scheduled Tasks to execute GPInventory from a command line to perform demanding or far-reaching queries during hours in which users and other resources won't be impacted. You can also use this functionality to schedule one or more queries on a repeating basis to establish a historical baseline.
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