Hyena

Overview

Total System Administration

Using the built-in Windows administration tools to manage a medium to large Windows NT or Windows 2000/2003 network can be a challenge. Add multiple domains, hundreds or thousands of servers, workstations, and users, and before you know it, things can get out of hand. Hyena is designed to both simplify and centralise nearly all of the day-to-day management tasks, while providing new capabilities for system administration. This functionality is provided in a single, centralised, easy to use product. Used today by tens of thousands of system administrators worldwide, Hyena is the one tool that every administrator cannot afford to be without.

Hyena uses an Explorer-style interface for all operations, including right mouse click pop-up context menus for all objects. Management of users, groups (both local and global), shares, domains, computers, services, devices, events, files, printers and print jobs, sessions, open files, disk space, user rights, messaging, exporting, job scheduling, processes, and printing are all supported.

In addition to supporting standard Windows system management functions, Hyena also includes extensive Active Directory integration. In fact, Hyena can be used on any Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista client to manage any Windows NT 3.51, 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 installation.

Hyena also includes full exporting and Microsoft Access-based reporting options. All of these features are part of the Standard Edition of Hyena. The Enterprise Edition adds support for Terminal Server user properties, Exchange 5.5/2000/2003 Server mailbox integration, and WMI integration.

Hyena's cost effective licensing policy is based on the number of administrators actually using the product, regardless of the number of end-users or servers. The 30-day evaluation copy is fully functional and free support is available both during and after the evaluation period.

To find out more about Hyena different management areas, select one of the categories below:

User Management

Perhaps no single administration task can take as much time as routine user and group administration, particularly in a large, complex Windows NT/200x installation. Setting up individual home directories, shares, and the security requirements can be especially time-consuming. Hyena's user management features are one of its core functions.

If your Windows NT/200x configuration makes use of home directories, Hyena has a unique solution for you: Hyena allows multiple templates to be configured that can be used to automatically create the user's home directory, optionally share it, plus configure the share and/or NTFS permissions...all automatically. This functionality is available for both standard and Terminal Server home directories.

Hyena's contains many other enhancements to the standard user management functions provided by built-in Microsoft utilities. Hyena can manage users by their group membership, and offer options for removal of user home directory and share information when users are deleted. If using Active Direcotory, Hyena allows user administration either through an OU or the All Users and All Groups objects, can also access the employee ID and photo attribute, and can show both direct and indirect group members. Another popular user-management feature is showing all logon information for either a single user account, or exporting the 'last logon' for every user in the domain.

Hyena User Management Functions (just for starters)

Quickly viewing all users for any server or workstation
Customisable user view display, plus one-click sorting on any attribute
View users by group membership
Viewing single user (designed for slow WAN connections)
Modifying single and multiple user properties
Extensive Active Directory (AD) user attribute support, including user photo capability, Exchange 5.5/200x integration, customisable AD queries, and much more. How much more? Click here for a sample.
Add/modify/delete Exchange mailbox properties [Enterprise Edition only]
Add/modify user terminal server information [Enterprise Edition only]
Reset password
Find buttons for login script and profiles on user properties dialog
Edit login script using Notepad or any user-defined editor
Explorer integration with user home and profile directories
Optional automatic cleanup of user home and profile directories
Access user home directory share properties;create user home directory and share automatically
Add new users, including copy from existing user (clone)
View user logon, including last logon, statistics
Rename user
Send message to user
Delete single or multiple users
Customisable batch files for special user handling requirements
Copy users from one computer to another
[Active Directory Only] Add selected users to designated group

Group Management Functions

Full group administration - add, modify, delete, copy
Rename groups
Copy groups from one computer to another
[Active Directory Only] View both direct and indirect (nested) group members for one or more groups
[Active Directory Only] View all group members, including for multiple groups/entire domain

Server Management

Most of Hyena's features are built around server and computer administration. With Hyena's multiple domain management layout, and the capability to build custom groups of objects such as servers and printers, Hyena can easily provide access to every aspect of server administration.

User Administration

Hyena can manage remote computer users on domains as well as individual workstations. Hyena can also remotely change the password for the same account on multiple computers, or make group membership changes to multiple computers at the same time.

Viewing Computers

Hyena provides several different ways to view computers, whether in domains, in workgroups, or in user-defined groups. Hyena can also filter domain lists by specific computer type (for example, Terminal Servers only), and can distinguish between computers that are online vs. added to the domain computer listing. Hyena can also access computers directly by tcp/ip address only, and can also provide access to a single computer's functions, so that the entire list does not have to be retrieved. Hyena provides full management of computer objects, including creating, changing attributes, and removing from the domain list.

Hyena's computer Properties function can display a wealth of information about a remote system including installed software applications, total memory, video and BIOS information, network cards, tcp/ip and DNS information, remote time, server roles (print server, SQL Server, etc.), installed hotfixes, environment variables, and more.

Share, Directory, and File Administration

Hyena fully supports all aspects of file and directory administration on any remote computer, as well as the underlying shares. All file and directory operations are performed through the shell.

Event Management

Hyena is integrated with the built-in Windows native event viewing tools. Hyena also contains its own more powerful event viewing tool and supports all event viewing and management functions, including options to view multiple active or saved logs from multiple computers at the same time.

Security

Hyena can manage remote computer account, audit policy, and user rights. Share and file security are also accessible for any share or file/directory.

Performance Monitoring

Hyena can monitor the performance counters for any remote system through its built-in Performance management object. User-customisable performance queries provide quick pre-defined access to dozens of performance areas including process, system, network, memory, disk, server, and more.

WMI

Without Hyena, if you want to utilise WMI you need to either learn scripting, or use one of Microsoft's free (and difficult to use) WMI utilities. With Hyena, you can fully utilitize the power of WMI, without the complexity. And if you don't know what WMI can provide you, find out what you are missing !

Service Administration

Both service and device driver information can be managed remotely with Hyena. Hyena also supports service startup modification and service installation for multiple computers at the same time.

Sessions and Open Files

Hyena can view all active sessions and open files for any server. Sessions can be viewed across multiple computers at the same file; users of individual files can also be discovered with the Open By... function.

Shutdown, Reboot, Wake Up !

Hyena has the capability to shutdown and optionally reboot any computer or server. Moreover, an administrator can perform a shutdown/reboot on multiple computers at the same time. Hyena also supports remote wakeup (WOL) for any number of computers.

Disk Space

Hyena's disk space view provides for a simple yet powerful overview of the disk space information for any server or workstation. Moreover, this same view can also be used on multiple computers at the same time, providing a fast and efficient way to monitor disk space across many computers.

Viewing Current Logons

Hyena can view the current interactive logons to any server or workstation. Scheduled Job Administration - Hyena can manage (add, view, modify, and remove) scheduled jobs on individual servers or workstations. Hyena can also view and add remote tasks to multiple computers at the same time.

Printers

Remote printer and print job management is supported in Hyena, as well as full printer property modifications, viewing and managing print jobs, and print queue operations. Hyena can also display the print jobs from more than one printer at a time.

Registry

Hyena supports management of remote computer registry information, including registry navigation, creating new keys/values, key and value deletion, value renaming, saving keys, searching, and modification of value properties. Hyena's registry search capabilities allow for searching over a wide array of search criteria.

Service Monitoring and Control

Most of the features in Windows are controlled by services, some of which operate under different logon accounts. Stopping and starting services remotely and changing service startup accounts and passwords can become time consuming. Performing these actions on a large set of computers can become a maintenance nightmare. Hyena can manage services on any number of computers at the same time, plus perform service control and startup changes in mass. Hyena's service administration features include:

Fast viewing and sorting of all service properties on any computer
Service control: start, stop, pause, continue, and restart
View service dependencies
Service installation on multiple computers
Service removal
Modify service properties
Control services on multiple computers at the same time
Change service startup information, including password, on multiple computers
Remote viewing of device drivers
Full support for Windows XP/200x service features, including Recovery options

Hyena's service administration features integrate with Hyena's reporting capabilities, and are part of Hyena's overall computer administration features.

Event Management

In addition to integration with the Windows NT/XP/200x native Event Viewer and MMC, Hyena also incorporates its own more powerful event viewing mechanism. Any server or workstation event log can be accessed in Hyena through the computer's context-menu. Hyena also supports advanced event viewing capabilities, as shown on the image below, including:

Viewing one or more event logs from more than one computer at the same time.
Filtering events by date/time range, event ID, event type, category, description text, user/group, or source.
Full support for event log clearing and backup.
Viewing one or more previously saved event backup (.evt) files.
Full support for new Windows XP and 200x event logs.
Sorting support on any event column in the view window.
Customisable event display.
Save option for event filters for faster recall of previous settings.

Job and Task Scheduling

Both Windows NT and Windows 2000 have built-in job scheduling systems, designed to run scheduled tasks at predetermined times. Unfortunately, the native system administration tools do not provide an easy way for administrators to view or manage remotely scheduled jobs. Hyena overcomes this limitation by providing easy access to any scheduled job on any Windows server or workstation.

Hyena's job scheduling functions support:

Viewing all scheduled jobs on one or more computers at the same time.
Automatic detection of remote computer job scheduling interface: AT or Windows Task Scheduler.
Adding, modifying, or deleting scheduled jobs. New jobs can be scheduled for immediate execution, or for any valid day-of-week or day-of-month combination.
Scheduling a job to run on multiple computers at the same time, with logging options and customisable job intervals.

Hyena includes support for both the Windows NT 'AT' job scheduling system, as well as the newer Task Scheduler that is integrated into IE 5.0 and Windows 2000 and later. Hyena provides direct access to the Task Scheduler job properties for any remote computer, including creating new tasks.

Hyena also includes important job cloning (copying) capabilities for Task Scheduler tasks. One or more "reference tasks" can be copied from a selected source computer to any number of destination (target) computers, complete with logging and automatic job internal spacing.

Printer Management

As a Windows NT or Windows 2000 installation grows, so do the number of printers that are installed on print servers and individual workstations. Unfortunately, the native tools on Windows NT/2000 are not very good at managing remote printers. Hyena was designed to overcome many of these limitations, and give system administrators and help desk staff better control over printers and print jobs.

As the image below shows, Hyena can display any printer, even non-shared printer, installed on any computer or server. Hyena's printer and job management functions include:

Listing printer information
Access to printer properties dialogs and desktop shell functions
Adding new remote printers (Windows 2000 only)
Viewing all print jobs from one or more printers at the same time with automatic refresh
Full print job control: pause, resume, restart, cancel
Full printer control: pause, resume, purge all print jobs
Deleting (removing) printers
Copying printer information from one computer to another

Disk and File Administrator

Disk and file administration, including routine file management, shared resource administration, and disk space monitoring, is perhaps the most common task performed by system administrators. Hyena excels in allowing system administrators full control over every disk and file related management task.

Routine Disk and File Administration

Hyena's tight integration with the Windows NT/2000 shell (Explorer) ensures safe and efficient routine disk and file operations, such as moving, deleting, and copying files and directories. Hyena provides full access to every file and directory on any remote server or workstation with an easy-to-use Explorer-style view. Hyena's Open Files view and individual file Open By... options provide administrators with quick snapshots of open resources. The directory Share As... option gives sharing capabilities to any selected directory.

Click here to see a full screen view of a typical file and directory view in Hyena.

Disk Space Management

The disk space functions do not require any server agents to be installed, and can be customised for a variety of server configurations, including some non-Windows platforms.

As with all disk views, Hyena provides full access to the Explorer shell under both Windows NT and Windows 2000. Hyena's settings can be configured to display disk space information in a variety of formats. And as always, this information can be copied to the clipboard, exported to delimited text files, or viewed on one of Hyena's many Microsoft Access-based reports.

Share Administration

Hyena incorporates a full range of share administration functions, including:

Creating, modifying, removing shares on any Windows NT/2000 computer
Browsing shares, and share directory and file contents
Modification of share permissions; viewing all share rights for entire server
Viewing connections to a share
Copying share definitions from one computer to another
Integration with Windows Explorer shell for share directory operations
NTFS file security display for shared directory and file permissions reporting

Reporting

Windows utilities lack any method to report, print, or extract information about your network configurations. SystemTools offers innovative and cost-effective solutions for extracting information from any Windows server or workstation:

Hyena set the standard for easy exporting and report generation for a wide spectrum of system information.

Microsoft Access-based Reporting

Hyena includes 18 built-in Microsoft Access reports (Microsoft Access must be purchased and installed separately from Hyena), covering many different areas of user, group, share, file access, events, and disk space. Hyena also supports automatic exporting of Active Directory (AD) data into a Microsoft Access database, providing for a powerful and flexible directory reporting tool when combined with Hyena's AD query capabilities.

Clipboard Compatibility

Hyena can copy any selected information, including Active Directory data, directly to Window's clipboard, for simple and fast pasting into other application.

Exporter Pro Integration

Selected objects in Hyena can be directed to Exporter Pro for quick and easy exporting. Exporter Pro can be licensed independently or used with Hyena for an unbeatable system management combination.

Active Directory

Hyena provides full support for Active Directory (AD) Organisational Units, directory searching, universal groups, management of object properties, security auditing, and other AD mixed and native mode features. Due to Hyena's ease-of-use, most AD environments can be managed more efficiently and quickly using Hyena's AD management functions. Hyena has numerous features that you won't find in the standard built-in Microsoft administration tools.

Windows 2000 domain object class

Hyena adds a new Windows 2000 domain object class. When a Windows 2000 domain is expanded in Hyena's tree window, additional sub-objects are displayed, specifically: Containers/OUs, All Users, All Groups, Global Groups, Local Groups, and Universal Groups objects. All management of the display of Active Directory objects are handled entirely by LDAP queries to Active Directory.

Organisational Units

Organisational Units (OUs) are fully supported, both for browsing OU contents, as well as for creating new users, groups, contacts, and computer objects directly into an OU. A powerful Find feature is available for any OU, allowing selectable criteria for finding and filtering AD information. OU properties are also available, including full support for management of Group Policy Object (GPO) information.

Filtering Toolbar

Hyena's Filtering Toolbar provides for powerful object filtering when browsing the contents of any OU, including traversing into sub-OUs.

Customisable AD queries

Hyena is the only product that supports customisable Active Directory queries at every object level. Define your own queries, or use any of the predefined queries to display custom "views" of exactly what directory attributes you want to see for organisational units, users, groups, or computers. Hyena's queries can also contain a customised LDAP filter, if desired, for the ultimate in server-side AD filtering and query performance.

View AD attributes

With Hyena, you can access and view any AD attribute, including, the employee ID and user photo attributes. Moreover, you can add your own custom AD attributes for managing users.

Edit AD

Hyena includes an extensive ADSIedit-like capability to manage any Active Directory attribute for one or more directory objects. But unlike ADSI-Edit, Hyena's AD attribute management dialogs are easy to use and understand. Plus, you can define your own attribute sets to be used over and over and visually see what the values are before and after making any changes.

Manage AD

Hyena supports the use of the standard shell property pages for management of many Active Directory objects, providing for full MMC-like functionality, while still providing Hyena's legendary ease-of-use and navigation. Hyena also supports the display of the shell context menu for most directory objects, providing access to popular Microsoft functions such as Exchange Tasks for email-enabled objects, as well as 3rd-party shell extensions.

Delegated Security

Active Directory administrators know how difficult it can be to keep track of delegated security rights. Hyena makes keeping track of this much easier with Active Directory Security Listing views : Just select one or more AD objects, right click, and select List Directory Security. Its that simple.

Find

Hyena provides access to the standard Microsoft Active Directory 'Find' dialog, but adds two important features: The selection criteria can be saved for future or external use, and the objects that are found can be returned to Hyena for further management tasks.

Exchange

Hyena supports management of Exchange 5.5 and 200x mailboxes: mailbox creation, deletion, and property modification can all be easily controlled in Hyena's powerful GUI.

Export data

As always, Hyena's output window, including any Active Directory displays, can be easily exported or integrated into Hyena's built-in Microsoft Access database.

New Features

Hyena v7.1 New Features

Dynamic WMI Method Execution

WMI contains a number of class methods that provide functionality that is often difficult or impossible to perform remotely through other tools. Previous releases of Hyena only provided support for a small fraction of the methods offered by WMI, since a separate dialog and software function was required for each method.

Hyena v7.1 now can access nearly any WMI method, including both class and instance methods. This new functionality now makes it possible to access previously inaccessible WMI methods to perform actions such as network address changes, DNS updates, Exchange queue functions and more.

Other Changes

Improved AD 'Manage Directory Attributes' function by adding an option to allow the attributes in any AD query to be selected as the attribute set. This new option, labeled 'Show all attributes defined in this Active Directory query' will by default automatically select the current query used to generate a set of AD objects, but any previously defined query can be selected from the combo box.

Added support for new Windows Vista user rights:
SeTimeZonePrivilege
SeIncreaseWorkingSetPrivilege
SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege
Modified the checking done for RAS support when run under Vista so that all Vista RAS functions use MPR interfaces and do not require the RAS .dll file(s).
Modified the AD user groups dialog so that any information entered in the manual group add text box will be added when closing the dialog with Enter / OK.
Removed trailing spaces from WMI 'Where' conditions.
Added an advanced registry setting to force Hyena to delete all AD sub-containers under a user object when a user is deleted. See the 'Advanced Registry Settings' help topic on how to configure this option.
Added an advanced registry setting to force Hyena to NOT create a NULL IPC$ connection when an error is encountered reading user and group information, typically when listing user and group members. This is only applicable to Windows NT or local group and user management. See the 'Advanced Registry Settings' help topic on how to configure this option.
Increased the number of characters available to enter the username when using the Batch Service Startup dialog.
Modified the Shutdown dialog to support entering the shutdown timeout in any combination of hours, minutes, and seconds.

Hyena v7.0 New Features

Improved Active Directory Query Management

The Active Directory query options have been both streamlined and simplified in Hyena v7.0. Queries can now be created or customised more easily, and a new View All Directory Attributes option lets you see all existing AD elements for any object. The 'View All' option is convenient for determining the attribute names used by Active Directory.

Custom Active Directory LDAP Filtering

Active Directory has always included a powerful mechanism that supports server-side filtering, but until now this capability was difficult to fully utilise. Hyena now provides an easy method of assigning the LDAP filter from Microsoft's query builder to Hyena's Active Directory engine, a combination that provides for a lot of new flexibility and performance improvements. New All Disabled Users and All Contacts default queries have been added which use this new capability and any number of other custom filters can be easily created.

Custom LDAP filters can also be executed at sub-container levels, providing the capability to search multiple directory levels, or even the entire directory at one time.

Microsoft Vista Compatibility

We've made a number of minor changes to address compatibility and integration issues with Microsoft Vista and will continue to monitor Vista feedback by our customers.

Other Changes

Added a Registry Security dialog.
Improved the Active Directory filtering options (through the AD toolbar) to improvement performance and integration with the new query options.
Added a new column (cn) for the name of the group when displaying group members.
When a column in Hyena's results window (right window) has been sorted, the sorted column will be highlighted if a Windows XP manifest file (enabled by default) is being used.
Improved the performance of reading from a shared settings file stored to a network or WAN location.
Added capability to enter multiple target computers in the Copy Printers To... option. Also saved previous settings on this dialog.
Enabled copying (Control-C) of the SID and GUID information on the Object tab of any AD properties page.
Enabled context and property sheet extensions for Active Directory contact objects.
Added status bar message when retrieving directory information for multiple objects when using the Manage Directory Attributes function.
Enabled the Security and List Security options for Active Directory public folder objects.
Added additional space to the Computer Properties->Software->Properties dialog, and also enabled multi-select on the main computer software listing, so that multiple items can be copied to the clipboard.

Hyena v6.7 New Features

Exporter Pro Improvements

Numerous changes have been to the interface of Exporter Pro to make it easier to view and modify export settings. We've also updated the documentation. For a complete list of the changes to Exporter Pro v2.0, included with Hyena v6.7, see the Exporter Pro help file.

Adding Custom Active Directory Attributes to AD Queries

When creating or modifying Active Directory queries using Object Manager (File->Manage Object View->AD Queries), Hyena uses an external text file (ad_schema.dat) to control the display of the Active Directory attribute names and to categorise them by object type. This is done because Active Directory lacks any simple, fast, and flexible way to show all of the attributes for a given object type. Moreover, the majority of AD attributes are named in a very user-unfriendly way and the majority of them are not useful or undocumented.

Hyena's approach was worked well over the years but has one drawback : There isn't a readily apparent way to add custom, new, or specific attributes that are not part of Hyena's built-in attribute list (schema). Hyena now includes a mechanism to add new or custom attributes to any AD query. To access this feature, click the dropdown combo box labeled Attribute Category on the AD queries dialog in Object Manager (after selecting the query that you want to modify). Select the "Other (specify attribute)" category. The resulting dialog will prompt for the name(s) of the attributes to add. To add multiple attributes, separate each attribute with a comma ( , ), or a new line by pressing Control-Enter.

Using Home Directory Templates when Modifying Users

By default, if a user's home directory path is changed, Hyena will prompt after updating the user if a home directory template should be used to set the home directory security.

A new option has been added to the user Profile and Terminal Server Profile dialogs to select a template. When a template is selected through the Use Template... button, Hyena will update the profile path, logon script (non-Terminal Server profile only), drive connection, and home directory path with the values from the template. The template values will only be used if the settings to be replaced are currently empty.

When the user is updated after clicking the OK button to close the User Properties dialog, Hyena will apply the security settings, if any, from the template on the user's home directory; Hyena will not re-prompt for the home directory template again, as its assumed that the template selected previously should be used when setting security options.

This new option has been added for instances where it is desirable to have an existing user get a standard set of Profile values without the need to manually enter the settings, and potentially cause problems if typographical errors are introduced.

This new option is not available when adding users or performing multi-user updates.

Entering Active Directory Alternate Credentials

Active Directory lacks a domain-level 'logon' capability other than logging in as a particular user or running an entire application under a particular security context ('Run As'). Instead, Active Directory allows an application to provide a username and password each time any directory object is accessed. Previously, Hyena would let Windows use the current username and password for any directory operation. Now, an optional different set of credentials can be provided for any domain in Hyena's console.

Hyena Windows XP Manifest File

Some time ago with the release of Windows XP, Microsoft created a little-known mechanism for developers (or users) to get their applications to use the newer Windows XP 'look' by using a specially formatted XML file called a 'manifest'. Hyena now includes a manifest file in its installation. The file is named hyena.exe.manifest and will be installed into the application directory. You can view the contents of the file if you want; its in XML.

What the manifest file essentially does is forces Windows to use the newer v6.x of comctl32.dll, which is available on Windows XP.

Hyena has nothing to do with this mechanism and should not be affected by the changes in the GUI that result when using a manifest file.

Using a manifest also fixes a problem if you have installed the newer Windows 2003 administration tools and are trying to use the Microsoft Shell Properties dialog for an OU. If you have the Windows 2003 Admin Tools loaded, the Group Policy tab on the Properties dialog for OUs will have a hotlink to the newer GPMC tool. Without the manifest, this tab won't function properly if you click on it. With the manifest file present, it works as expected. Note that all 'Shell Properties' are not Hyena functions per-se, but are Microsoft-created mechanisms.

If you prefer the 'older' look of Hyena when run on Windows XP, simply rename the hyena.exe.manifest file to something else. Note that it will be re-installed when installing updates or patches.

Visual Studio 2003 Conversion

Hyena and Exporter Pro have been rebuilt using Microsoft Visual Studio 2003, including using new MFC and runtime 'C' libraries. Due to this change, a new installation program is included, which copies new library (.dll) files.

These new .dll files are named mfc71u.dll, msvcp71.dll, and msvcr71.dll

Visual Studio 2003 is also referred to as the .Net architecture.