Video Transcript

Hello. This is Jeff Hicks. Today I want to show you a few things in Windows 7 that will help you reach out and touch computers on your network so that you do not have to leave your desk. You are probably familiar with Windows Remote Assistance, but let me show you something that maybe you are not familiar with. One of the problems with Remote Assistance has always been is that you have to rely on the user to ask you for help. You can configure through Group Policy a setting so that the user does not have to do that. You can offer remote assistance.

Under Computer Configuration/Policies/Administrative Templates/System/Remote Assistance, you will look for this Policy called Offer Remote Assistance. You will enable this. You can then specify one or more groups or users that you want to be able to offer remote assistance. Once that policy is in place, you can, on your machine, come here and run msra/offerra or you can get to Remote Assistance through the normal mechanisms. If I do this it now brings up a quick prompt, very quick and easy. I want to choose client2, I can click next it will then connect to client 2. On client2 the logged on user will see a message saying someone is trying to connect, do you want to allow them to establish a remote connection? They say yes and Remote Assistance starts all very nice and easy.

Another tool that we have at our disposable is Computer/ Manage. Now I'm sure you may have used it to manage your local computer. Very nice if you work with Task Scheduler, Event Viewer, so on. But we can also right-click, select Another Computer, type in the name of the other computer client2. Click OK and now I am connected to client2 and I can manage and do everything that want to with client2 almost as if I were at the computer.

We also have a number of command line tools that lend themselves nicely to scripting. For example, let's say I want to find the status of a service running on a computer, there is a command line tool called sc and I want to connect to \\client2 and I am going to query the browser service (sc \\client2 query browser) and I can see that is in fact running. Let's say I want to stop it, just remove query, add stop browser (sc \\client2 stop browser) and now it has stopped. There is also a nice little tool for example called tasklist (tasklist /s client2) and now I can see all the running processes on my computer client2.

We have PowerShell, which also offer a number of remote management possibilities. There are cmdlets like get-service that have a perimeter called 'ComputerName (get-service 'ComputerName client2), I can type in the computer name I want or I can type in multiple computer names and I can get a list of all those services. Look for a number of cmdlets that have that -ComputerName. Lastly, what's really interesting with PowerShell version 2 is that I can run a cmdlet called Enter-PSSession and I am going to connect to client2 (Enter-PSSession 'ComputerName client2) and now I have, notice that the prompt changed, a complete interactive session that is kind of like Telnet or Secure Shell that is running on that computer. So, if I look at the C: that is the C: on client2. Now I can take advantage of cmdlets that don't work remotely, for example if I want to stop a service, stop spooler service (stop-service spooler-force) I can now stop that and if I want to start it again, I can start it again. So I can work with all the cmdlets available to me as if I am sitting in front of the computer client 2.

Those are some of the tools we have available on Windows 7 that allow you reach out and touch other people and make their lives and your lives a whole lot easier. Thank You.