Bit of an oldie here, and still untested with newer GSM Phones, however should you want to have SMS capability in your organization this may be a cheap way to go.
It requires a compatible phone (and cable) and then you can fire off scripts (or commandlines) to send sms messages. Seem easy enough, but sadly I don’t have a data cable to the old Nokia phone in our storage room 🙁
Do let me know if you try it and it works 🙂
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/outreach/dnloads/smssender.mspx
SMSSender.msi
Update:
I finnally had the chance to test this (I had no data cable for my cell phone), anyway it is all very straight forward until you try to send an sms from command line, this will fail with a message like this “there is no device previously used by SMS sender…….”.
Unfortunately the SMS sender software has a bug that causes it NOT to write your choice from the GUI to registry :-(, so you need to enter the device name manually to registry.
The keyname is;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SMSSender
The key is a sting;
DeviceName
And the value is the name of your device/cell phone (as displayed in the GUI)
eg. “Nokia 6230i USB Modem” (without quotes)
once this is done you can send command line sms’s (as shown below P=phone number M=message L=Log message);
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SMS Sender>smssender.exe /p:12345678 /m:"Hello World" /l
There are more details plus some C++ code for semi implementation into your own software here (it’s a rather basic launch routine for the exe file);
http://veskokolev.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-send-sms-under-windows-using.html
One problem with the SMS sender software if you use it in scripting, it will once the SMS is send bring up a message window telling you that the sms was send succesfully, now this is not that practical it this actually ‘halts’ thr process until the message window is closed (the above C++ code will as I can see solve this by killing the window afterwards). Another issue, ONLY ONE sms can be send at the time, if you try to send several SMS’s in a row the software will fail – guess that is logical enough but not that practical if the script that sends the sms can somehow be called several times at nearly the same time..
Aparantly there also exists an Outlook 2003/2007 extention (MOSA) that will do something similar vai Outlook, I have not had time to test this but as it’s also from Microsoft it should work just as well or maybe even better(however this requires Outlook);
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=240080b4-986e-4afb-ab21-3af2be63508b&displayLang=enSo you for some reason or other need a custom GroupPolicy template (.adm template) to set some strange setting for some odd software.
You can use a Policy.ADM file to set custom registry values either for your own pc (may seem like a bit overkill) or more likely for your domain.
Well I have created a few of these back in the good old NT4 days and it was not all that difficult once you got the hang of it, and thus when I had the need again lately I was confident I could get it to work without too much of a hassle.
I was wrong :-/
Ok, creating a simple policy.adm file is easy;
And if you enter a keyname like;
”SoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftwhatever”
Things will work brilliantly, however lets say you want to change some obscure value for the adobe reader!? This is outside the “Policies” section of the registry.. things will look like this when you enter the GPM MMC console.
This is where I lost my temper and started cursing at my monitor, see again once I put “Policies” in the keyname everything worked like a charm (but my setting was NOT in the Policy region of the registry)..
So Google to the rescue, it would seem that things have changed since the good old Poledit days, and that you need to do a bit of editor tweaking to get those ‘dirty’ settings available under NT4+ systems now-er-days.
Here is the secret;
View, Filtering, “Only show policy settings that can be fully managed”..
Once this is done you can see everything – just like in the good old days 😀
Also it’s worth noting the other filter settings, I did not even know they existed, now you can actually limit your view to only those settings that are set, and this DO make it a lot easier to overlook the more complex policies.
Good luck making your new policies its easy as pie you know..
Links;
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/645000852731/inc/-1
http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/ADM-Template-Repository.html
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738443.aspx
So you would like to run MSRT manually (the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool, the one that comes once a month from Microsoft via Windows Updates and cleans different infections from your pc), well as written in an earlier post https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=463 you can download a version straight from Microsoft, however it turns out there is an even easier method, simply go to your “start menu”, select “Run” and enter “MRT” and hit enter..
There is even the option to launch it with parameters so you could schedule it to run at regular intervals if you would like.
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