Help-desk self-service


Helping help-desks help, without letting them help themselves to your AD!

Help Desk : Our portable, customisableAD management launcher!

A much-overlooked feature of our Automation Studio product is our extremely handy Active Directory management ‘Help Desk’ app. The app is written completely in our FastTrack Script language (fully open for you to view and tweak) and enables the IT Administrator to ‘empower’ help-desk staff to safely perform selected everyday tasks of Active Directory management. All of this is done using a single & simple portable 1.2 MB EXE file. There’s nothing to ‘install’, and no MMC snap ins or special privileges required!

The app setup wizard allows you to supply an appropriately created administrator account which gets ‘baked in’ to the EXE. When launched, your newly empowered user can perform all the AD duties you have allowed, without you having to hand over any AD administrator rights.

Granular delegation of common Active Directory management tasks

Better still, when you build the app, you have complete granular control of what parts of the app you want to provide to your users. For instance, you might ONLY want to give a help-desk user / team the ability to view group Active Directory group membership, to unlock user accounts and perhaps restart the print spooler service.


For further control, you can also ‘lock’ the ‘scope’ of the Help Desk application to a specific AD OU, which provide even greater granularity.

Customisability is key

Being written in completely open FastTrack Script code, simply reviewing our Help Desk application code I find is a great means to explore the capabilities of our scripting language. Go ahead and borrow parts of it as inspiration for other apps you want to create, or clone and then extend it with some additional script of your own. You have over 1,500 commands to play with.

If you wanted to beef up the password changer app so that for example:

  • Only launch on a PC with a specific MAC address
  • Only allow changes to users in a certain OU during work hours
  • Fire off a web request to your CRM logging to the change request task
  • Email the user informing them of the password change

Yes, that’s all possible!

So why not download your free trial copy today?


OTHER CYBERSECURITY BLOGS



Rating: 5 out of 5

"Use this as a replacement for VBScript and PowerShell"

"It's easy to include attractive GUI elements in FastTrack scripts, beyond the basic dialog boxes and text input that VBScript offers ... Another powerful feature is the ability to distribute scripts as Windows Installer (.msi) or standard .exe files. Although interesting in its own right, this ability results in a much more intriguing capability: to repackage -- or wrap -- software installers as .msi files without using snapshots. If you've ever created an .msi installer file from before-and-after system snapshots, for use with a software distribution system such as Group Policy or SCCM, then you know how hit-and-miss the results can be."

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Rating: 8 out of 10

"Faster than the rest"

"We found the FastTrack syntax to be more transparent and easier to learn than Microsoft's PowerShell – the editor in particular provided good support in this regard. the Script Editor offers a large number of options from the command set through to simple output of graphical elements, which cannot be achieved at all with PowerShell or other solutions or only with a significantly greater level of effort."

"Anyone wanting to tackle the many hurdles in everyday admin and especially anyone for whom logon scripts and client automation is a priority will benefit from the variety of functions offered by FastTrack."

Review in English      Review in German