7-Zip provides a handy way to do this. All you need to do is right-mouse-drag the Zip file to the destination folder, release the right-mouse button, and go to 7-Zip –> Extract … from within the context menu.

I’d been using 7-Zip for years before I figured this one out.

The client software is easily deployed via Active Directory and Group Policy, but there’s a problem where the Outlook integration installer requires elevation, even though the only changes that are being made are restricted to the user’s profile. This is obviously ridiculous in a corporate environment, as new user setups require the user to be made a local administrator for their first login just to install Shoretel’s Outlook integration.

I lived with this as an inconvenience over the last few years, but the time has now come to plan for a replacement of our Melbourne office’s out-dated Ericsson PABX system. This issue, then, will be a show-stopper as we’re not going to make 80+ users local administrators – even temporarily.

Last week, I sat down to think about the problem and remembered something I’d read about “shimming” applications in Vista & Windows 7. This then led me to wonder if I could create a shim that stops UAC from being triggered by the Shoretel Outlook integration installer – %programfiles%\Shoreline Communications\ShoreWare Client\UninstWrpr.exe

The above process will obviously break any functionality within UninstWrpr.exe that does actually require elevated privileges, but that’s not a concern to me. I went ahead and created a new Security Database using Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit, and set up the shim as per one of the technet documents. I installed the resulting sdb file on a test machine using the inbuilt sdbinst.exe command, and voila! The Outlook integration installed without a single UAC prompt, and worked properly to boot.

The only part of the process left, is to figure out how to deploy the shim to the client machines. For the sake of brevity, I’ll detail the entire process in a new post shortly.

What does this mean?, you say. It means you’ve got one neat console where you can manage all your remote connections in one place. mRemote currently supports these protocols:

• RDP (Remote Desktop)
• VNC (Virtual Network Computing)
• ICA (Independent Computing Architecture)
• SSH (Secure Shell)
• Telnet (TELecommunication NETwork)
• HTTP/S (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
• Rlogin (Rlogin)
• RAW

I haven’t set it up fully yet, but it will be really handy to have all my web-based admin areas and SSH to Linux boxes in there too.

A side note, it uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so some web-based admin pages may not display properly. This, however is no fault of mRemote or Firefox’s.

I had a brain wave a few months back, where I remembered something from my MCSA training (so it wasn’t useless after all).

It’s a pain when you open services.msc, and the first thing you always need to do is change to standard view.

The steps are as follows:

• Expand ‘Administrative Tools’ in the Start menu.
• Right-click on Services, and select ‘Author’

• In the Services console, change to standard view, and then save the console.

I’d seen the files on SourceForge before, but never had any use for them until today – when I had to boot a machine into BartPE and use ClamAV.

These will be moving into a permanent home on my new 4GB flashdrive when it arrives.

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