Windows Phone Thoughts: Expand Beyond's Mobile Suite for Microsoft 2.3 reviewed

Local Users Browser
As with the domain users browser, here you can add, delete, enable & disable users, change their password and see which groups they are a member of.

Local Groups Browser
As with the domain groups browser, you can see what groups exist and manage the membership of those groups. You cannot delete or add groups.

Local Printers Browser
As with the domain printers browser, you can see what printers are defined for the currently selected computer. If there are any jobs in the queue for a printer, you can pause, cancel or resume the job.

Local Shares Browser
Here, you can see all of the shares defined for the currently selected computer. For non-administrative shares, you can see further details of the share and manipulate the permissions of the share. It is also possible to add new shares.

Local Computers Browser
It is from the local computers browser that you can see general information about the system, browse the defined environment variables, shutdown, reboot or power off the computer and manage IIS or Exchange. It should be noted that only IIS 6 can be managed - earlier versions do not support the programming interfaces that Expand Beyond are using. IIS management is currently limited to stopping, starting or pausing the selected Web site within the IIS configuration. As can be seen from Figure 28, the software doesn't display the proper name for each Web site. Instead, it displays an internal IIS name, which isn't very helpful if you've got more than one site defined.


Figure 28: Managing IIS.

If the selected computer is running Exchange, two additional tabs appear, allowing you to review the queues (Figure 29) and the connectors (Figure 30). If you are using Exchange 2003, you can list all of the messages that are in a queue and freeze, thaw or remove individual messages. The table layout for the queues could do with a bit of time spent improving it - taking up five lines for each row means that (a) you don't see many queues on a screen, (b) you lose the column headers off the top of the screen too quickly and (c) it is just too darn hard to figure how which cell matches onto which column.


Figure 29: Exchange queues.


Figure 30: Detail of an Exchange connector.

Local Events Browser


Figure 31: Events browser.

The local events browser allows you to drill down the events log of the currently selected computer. As you can see from Figure 31, the list of event logs shown is dependent on the logs available from the computer. The server selected in this example is a Domain Controller. Selecting a log takes you down to the next level, where you can clear the log or page through the events (Figure 32). You can then click on a specific event entry to see the full detail (Figure 33).


Figure 32: Looking at the application events.


Figure 33: Looking at a specific event entry.