Chapter 5: The Optional Windows Components and Application WMI Providers

5.1 Objective

Throughout Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book dedicated to WMI, we discovered a lot of classes with their associated WMI providers. This discovery was a long process and showed some of the infinite management capabilities offered by WMI. However, the WMI providers and classes discovered in these chapters only focused on the core Operating System components. At no time were optional components, such as Terminal Services or Internet Information Server, considered. Similarly, Microsoft desktop and server applications, such as Office 2000, Internet Explorer, Exchange 2000, and SQL Server 2000, were not considered. Last but not least, management software, such as Insight Manager, Microsoft Operation Manager, and HP OpenView, were not considered either. The aim of this chapter is to give a brief overview of the WMI capabilities of these various applications. Reading the previous chapters brought you the necessary background to master the WMI scripting techniques. This implies that the remaining challenge is to understand the WMI capabilities of these applications. This is why this chapter will describe the WMI capabilities supported by the applications, without a specific focus on the scripting technique itself. Therefore, we will not systematically develop scripts for each feature, since the scripts will use the exact same scripting techniques as the ones provided throughout the previous chapters.