MaxPowerSoft’s Active Directory Reports 5.3.0.0

I just wanted to take a moment and say some nice things about a product from MaxPowerSoft.  The product is Active Directory Reports, and it does exactly what name says.  It reports information about Active Directory.  On the Forest level it reports the Domain Security Policy and lists the Domain Controllers.  At the User level it has all of the basic reports you would expect and need.  The User reports are grouped by General User, Account Status, Logon Status, Password Status, Group Membership, and Administrators.  With the groups having between 6 and 16 reports each.  There are additional sections for reporting on Groups, OU’s, Computers, GPOs, and Contacts.  Each section has between 6 and 22 reports. 

So, what do I like about the application.  First, I admit there are other applications doing the same thing.  And my co-worker and I looked at and tried many of them.   We were looking for something inexpensive and easy to use.  Active Directory Reports stands out in a few areas.  The interface is intuitive and easy to use.  The application (with a few exceptions) runs very fast.  The reporting is very accurate.  And MaxPowerSoft is continuously updating their product. Since October 2009 they have released 5 new versions.

There are many other features that I would love to go into, but simply don’t have the time (nor the desire) to do a full review.  If you are looking for a simple, easy to use Active Directory reporting tool, do yourself a favor and look at Active Directory Reports from MaxPowerSoft.  Their home page is: http://www.maxpowersoft.com/.

Take care,

Michael K

www.lightworks-images.com

Finally!

After three weeks of working with GIMP, HTML, and CSS I have a working web site that I’m happy with (www.lightworks-images.com).  I’m sure in a month I will look at it and decide to tweak it some more.  And by then I will have forgotten everything I just learned and have start over.  I like to learn new things so it works out well.

Anyway now I can focus on taking pictures, instead of building them a home.

At least for me selecting colors is a slow painful task.  I’m not sure how it works for real web designers, but I just have an awful time selecting colors. This time I decided to use a photograph I liked to select the colors.  I was betting that nature had a better sense of color than I did.  I looked at a several different web sites. Here are some thoughts on a couple. http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/colors.php  did a nice job. Giving me a selection of 15 colors to use and generating sample CSS code (very simple code).  I also used http://jrm.cc/color-palette-generator/.  I didn’t like the way it doesn’t give you the color numbers unless you are hovering over the color.  But I did discover if you select the entire color block and then cut and paste into Word, it creates a line per color with the color number embedded into the colored line. I know there are a few other color generators out there, but these are the ones that worked for me

I hope these sites are useful to you in your color decisions.

Take care,

Michael K

Another Day Another Change!

I left my bed at 5:30 this morning in order to catch the early morning sun light on the flowers at the Bellevue Botanical Garden.  I did get some pictures, but discovered most of the flowers were shaded by the trees in the early morning.  Oh well! 

I have decided to change my web site from www.michaelks-lightworks.com to www.lightworks-images.com.  I like the new name because it takes my name (and ego) out of the picture.  I really wanted to get www.lightworks.com, but it is already in use by what looks like an astrology site.  Too bad!

While I’m changing things I want to change the color scheme.  Oh yes, and the look and feel.  I guess I will leave the pictures alone .  I’ve spent the last few days searching the internet for a design and color scheme I like.  I’ve been looking at colors a lot on kuler.adobe.com.  Like you would expect from Adobe, this is a killer site when it comes to color.  Check it out!

Take care,

Michael K

Starting Over

I started a blog about 2 1/2 years ago, but didn’t keep it up.  Since then I’ve switched jobs and now I’m working at Crista Ministries as a Network Engineer (still a geek I guess).  I work with Mike Silva who runs the blog at Corner Pixel, and he has inspired me to start blogging again.

My passion (other than God, family, and technology) is photography.  I have a website over at Smugmug, http://www.michaelk-lightworks.com/ and I try to keep it up to date, but over the past year either my standards have gone up or I’m just not producing any photo’s of merit.  I hope it is a mix of both. I’m hoping this blog will force me to be more creative on a regular basis.  Anyway that is enough babbling for one day.  Thanks for dropping by.  In the future I will share photos with you or just comments on technology or photography.  Or maybe technology and photography.  Bye!