You can then add an OLE control to monitor your machine's performance (much like Perfmon does). From the Computer Management snap-in you added under Console Root, right-click to bring up a menu of actions. (You can also click the Action menu above Console Root to see your options.) Select New to add one of four objects--a folder, a link to a Web address, a general control, or a monitoring control. Selecting the monitoring control starts a wizard for inserting ActiveX monitor controls. Select Next to see a list of available monitor controls. To add Perfmon-like functionality, check Sysmon Graph Control and select Next. The final dialog box lets you name this control on your console window. After you add this new control, you can select it and add objects and counters as you would in Perfmon. Right-click the results window, and select Add Counters or Properties. When you save the tool to an .msc file, MMC saves the counters in the same manner as when you create a Perfmon workspace file.
Finally, you can add a link to Microsoft's Support Online Web site. To add it under the Console Root, right-click Console Root or click the Action menu and select Link to Web Address. The Explorer dialog box pops up and asks for a Web address. Enter http://support
.microsoft.com/support, and select Next.
You can further customize your tool and make it easier for your users. For example, you can create multiple windows within MMC to separate functionality. To use this feature, right-click the Console Root and select New Window From Here. Selecting this option creates a new window that starts from your current location. In the workstation tool example, you could create a new window from the Sysmon Graph Control. Thus you'd have a second window whose root is the graph control, as Screen 5 shows. You can use this window to separate snap-ins or objects that need an uncluttered window.
Sharing Tools and Delegating Management
You can save your custom MMC tool in a file and retrieve it when you need to manage your NT 5.0 workstation. You save the tool with an .msc extension, and MMC automatically stores them in your NT 5.0 user profile in a folder called My Administrative Tools. This folder is in %userprofile%\StartMenu\
Programs.
You can also create machine-specific administrative tools in %systemroot%\
profiles\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\
Administrative Tools. Tools stored in this file are available to all users who log on to the machine. When you load NT 5.0, you'll see several .msc files in the All Users profile. These files provide the same management functionality as NT 4.0's Administrative Tools group, and they contain information about the snap-ins you've loaded and other customizations such as multiple windows and window position. These .msc files are similar to advanced Perfmon workspace files.
MMC lets you create a tool, save it as an .msc file, and distribute the tool to your users through email or their default profiles. When a user runs the tool, MMC loads the information about which snap-ins the tool contains. MMC by default stores snap-ins in %systemroot%\system32 on an NT 5.0 workstation or server. Snap-ins are DLLs that MMC loads. For example, the DLL that provides the Event Viewer functionality is called els.dll.
You can distribute a tool to users who don't have the snap-ins on their workstations or servers. If the users are on an NT 5.0 network using Active Directory (AD), you can give them the snap-ins. Snap-ins are OLE services, so you can make them available to all AD users via the Class Store. The Class Store is an AD object that lets you provide centralized information about object classes to your applications. In the case of snap-ins, when a user on an NT 5.0 workstation or server opens an MMC tool that contains a snap-in that isn't available locally, the workstation or server can query the Class Store to see whether it recognizes the object class and to learn its location. This functionality makes your tools portable within your NT 5.0 network. If you're currently managing an NT 4.0 network, you'll appreciate this benefit. Because I move from workstation to workstation, I must repeatedly connect to a server that has the correct version of User Manager for Domains or Server Manager. With MMC, I can easily move around on the network if I have my .msc files and AD.
It's All There for the Taking
Systems administrators will embrace MMC because it makes NT network management simple. MMC provides one customizable console to perform numerous tasks on multiple machines, users, drives, and services. Microsoft's challenge with MMC is to provide premium service across the board and convince third parties to develop compat-
ible applications. Only time will tell whether Microsoft can convince independent software vendors (ISVs) that writing snap-ins is the best way to manage their products.