SCRIPTING TOOLS
Our readers gave top honors for scripting tools to ScriptLogic Corporation's ScriptLogic v4, software that combines "codeless" logon scripting, group policies, user profile management, and software deployment.
ScriptLogic's "hands-off" approach to administration lets users logon from any PC—over any LAN, dial-up, or VPN connection—and instantly have access to their unique desktop configuration. ScriptLogic is compatible with all Win32 operating systems. Features include "Run As Administrator" software deployment, multi-script profiles, logoff and shut down scripting, and full support for Active Directory Organizational Units.
ScriptLogic reduces client-side administration of Windows PCs by 50 percent through an automatic policy-based creation of Outlook/Exchange mail profiles, as well as the centralized administration of drive and printer mappings, proxy server access, Microsoft Office paths, service pack deployment, antivirus updates, and security policies. All of this is done through an intuitive GUI-based manager and without writing a single line of code.
FILE SYSTEM TOOLS
The voting left Winternals Software's NTFSDOS Professional v4.03 with little competition in our Readers' Choice Awards. The file system tool captured 87 percent of the vote in the category Best File System Tools.
Using NTFS for Windows XP/2000/NT system partitions provides many advantages, but the drawback is that using it prevents you from accessing the NTFS volume to repair problems from a boot diskette. That's where NTFSDOS Professional comes in. NTFDOS Pro takes the NTFS files and drivers from an existing Windows XP/2000/NT4 installation and simulates the environment they normally run in, allowing them to function inside of MS-DOS.
This approach lets NTFSDOS Pro access your NTFS volumes using the same Microsoft drivers that Windows XP/2000/NT4 use, ensuring compatibility with your NTFS drives—regardless of the version and Service Pack of NT you happen to use. You gain full read/write access to your NTFS volumes from within MS-DOS, and you can run third-party applications to effect a wide range of repairs.
UNDELETE TOOLS
Executive Software won its second of two Readers' Choice Awards with Undelete 2.0, which provides a cost-effective, instant recovery solution that completes a company's overall data protection strategy and eliminates the high cost of going to backup.
Before products such as Undelete, file recovery was labor intensive and fell upon the already overburdened system administrator, who then had to search through hours of backup tapes to find the deleted file. With Undelete, you can restore deleted files quickly and remotely, allowing a user to have an occasional "human" moment of accidentally deleting a file, and then realizing it's needed after all.
Undelete safely replaces the Windows Recycle Bin with a Recovery Bin that captures all deleted files, even files that typically bypass the Recycle Bin. You can even recover files you purged from the Recovery Bin or files deleted before installing Undelete. Emergency Undelete recovers files directly from the disk, if they have not already been written over.