Specops Remote Admin CTP

So I recently saw a demo of Specops Remote Admin CTP, an update on the very popular GPUpdate tool, which is now based around Powershell. I was particularly excited by it because they have taken a similar approach to the Exchange 2007 team , i.e. build the GUI tool on top of Powershell cmdlets and show in the tool the Powershell commands which are running to complete your GUI actions. This approach is great because it gets people interested in Powershell and shows them how simple it is to be very effective with it.

There are two flavours, GPUpdate 2.0 and Remote Admin. GPUpdate is free, Remote Admin is currently CTP and will be chargeable on full release.


The Setup Assistant gets you up and running by checking if you meet the system requirements and installing them for you if you don't have them. Basically you need .Net 3.5, Powershell and register a Display Specifier in AD.


Once installed, within ADUC right-click a computer and you will see Specops Remote Admin.

Choosing Specops Remote Admin displays a list of the tools you can use.



Selecting one of the tools shows the available options you can execute or schedule and best of all it shows the Powershell code which is running the command!



Of course you can use all of these tools from the command line. First you need to add the Specops snapins to your profile.

add-pssnapin Specopssoft.GpUpdate
add-pssnapin Specopssoft.Adx

Then you can find the commands available to you from Specops.



So, say you want to get all the machines in a particular OU to check in with the WSUS server, its as simple as:


Try it out for yourselves here. You can also listen to Thorbjörn Sjövold CTO of Special Operations Software talk about the tool in Episode 2 of the Get-Scripting Podcast.