Executive Summary:
This year's Windows IT Pro Innovators award winners found inventive solutions to problems ranging from automating Web-site creation, tracking logons, and deploying software to doing compliance-mandated auditing and making over an intranet portal.
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By definition, IT is a behind-the-scenes profession. Your non-IT coworkers take IT services and your skills
for granted—unless, of course, email isn’t working or the network dies, and then suddenly all eyes are on
you. Although most IT folks didn’t get into the career to become rock stars, at Windows IT Pro, we believe
your talent for solving problems and understanding technology is worthy of recognition.
Giving IT professionals the appreciation they deserve is the main intent of the Windows IT Pro Innovators contest,
now in its third year. Among this year’s winning entries are an automated Web-site creation solution, a custom-
built internal portal, two solutions that greatly simplified complex software upgrades, and two methods for
tracking users’ access to systems and applications. The common thread among this diverse group of solutions is
the resourcefulness of the IT pros who created them, using their problem-solving skills and the tools at hand.
We hope this year’s award winners will inspire you when you’re dealing with your own IT challenges. As in
previous years, we’ve published the winners’ email addresses, so feel free to contact any of them if you want more
information about their solutions.
Grand Prize Winners
Creating Web
Sites in a Snap
At most universities,
staff, students, and
teachers rely on the
Web for disseminating
college and course-related information.
Instructors and professors publish class schedules,
assignments, lecture notes, and students’
grades on their Web pages. Staff maintain college
and division sites with news and forms for
current and potential students. With thousands
of sites and hundreds of requests pouring in,
keeping up with the demands was straining
the University of Wyoming’s small IT staff, as
Systems Programmer Rowdy Downey explains.
“We were getting 25 to 50 requests per week to manage sites for authors. We have thousands of
professors, departments, colleges, units, classes,
projects, and so on, all wanting to set up, delete,
or manage configurations for their sites. Fulfilling
these requests quickly became a massive
drain on our time, so I decided to automate the
site-creation process.”
Rowdy launched the project by first investigating
whether an existing product could do
the job he required. “We wanted to create sites
that were sandboxed, secure, manageable, and
flexible,” he says. “I couldn’t find any [product]
robust enough to meet our requirements.”
Rowdy believed he could build the solution
himself, but before he could begin development,
he spent a lot of time researching blogs
and Microsoft and scripting sites to find the tools, scripts, and techniques he’d need.
Rowdy’s solution consists of a combination of ASP and ASP.NET, plus several Microsoft
utilities (adsutil.vbs, iisvdir.vbs, xcacls
.vbs, owsrmadm.exe, rmtshare.exe, and sleep
.exe), all tied together in a 2,388-line VBScript
program. “Although this seemed like a relatively
simple automation solution, it quickly proved
to be quite involved,” says Rowdy. “The solution
needed to be able to create and configure
groups, set permissions for sites and databases,
set ODBC connections, set metabase configurations,
create IIS sites, extend sites with
Microsoft FrontPage extensions, create shares,
and set share permissions.”
The utility uses the university’s Active Directory
(AD) infrastructure and properties set on various universal groups to control authoring
and browsing to specific sites. Rowdy developed
secure Web interfaces through which
faculty, staff, and students can submit requests
to create, delete, and manage site properties.
Scheduled jobs launch the utility to perform
the actual work. The solution handles multiple
site-configuration options, including basic
sites, FrontPage-extended sites, multimedia
streaming sites, calendar sites, development
sites, data-access capabilities, site-browse
restrictions, and forced Secure Sockets Layer
options. This same utility has been ported
to provide University of Wyoming students
personal sites that they use for portfolios, class
assignments, and graduate projects, all with
the benefit of automated administration to
minimize resource drain.
Hosting the numerous on-campus sites
in a secure, sandboxed environment requires
running hundreds of
application pools concurrently
in Microsoft
Internet Information
Services (IIS)
6.0. This approach
has revealed certain
architectural limitations
of Windows.
Rowdy says that moving
to 64-bit hardware
will ultimately alleviate
these problems.
Rowdy says that
the Web-site–creation
solution has saved the
university’s IT staff
“countless hours”
in the three years it’s
been in use. “We went
from Web site requests
taking a large chunk of time from multiple members of the IT team
down to taking maybe one-quarter of a full-time
employee’s time. Much of the benefit is realized
because site authors can manage their own sites
without Help desk intervention. This saves a
great deal of time on everyone’s part and is much
closer to a real-time solution.” Although faculty
and students as well as IT have benefited from
the solution, Rowdy found that using his own
resourcefulness and technical skills to solve the
problem was equally gratifying. “This solution is
an example of taking the tools you have available
and molding them into the solution you need!”
Custom Logon-Tracking
Solution
Keeping track of users’ access to computers
is an ongoing challenge for IT administrators.
Brandon Jones, a systems administrator at
Northern Arizona University—and two-time
winner of a Windows IT Pro Innovators grand
prize—faced this challenge by developing a
custom logon-tracking solution that provides
detailed information about students’ computer
use in the university’s College of Business.
Brandon, who’s one of four people in the
business college’s IT department, decided that
the school needed a more efficient way to collect
usage statistics for machines in different
areas of the business-college building. Several
factors led to his decision to develop the solution,
ranging from a desire to know whether and
when students used lab computers, to the ability
to easily view logon data and track user statistics.
“Microsoft tools such as event logs and user
properties in Active Directory are cumbersome
and don’t even approach the level of detail and
ease of use we were after,” says Brandon.
The custom solution Brandon developed
relies on disparate technologies, including
VBScript scripts, Windows user environment
variables, and Microsoft Access. Brandon
explains how all these tools work together in
his solution.
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