As a system administrator one of my goals is to automate all my repetitive tasks at work. that includes, installation of client software, system updates, maintenance of printers, active directory repetitive tasks etc. automating all these tasks help system administrators to save time and reduce human errors.

Learning a scripting language can be tedious, but is a time worth spending. once you master a scripting language you will be able to automate many repetitive tasks that consume a great part of your time at work.

Kixtart is a free scripting language with built-in functionality for easy scripting. there is almost nothing that you can’t automate on your network with Kixtart. printers, software installation, remote registry manipulation, short-cuts, drive mapping etc, just to name a few can be accomplished using Kixtart.   Kixtart has support for COM, providing access to ADSI, ADO, WMI etc.

When learning Kixtart make sure to read the manual, everything there is about Kixtart is in the manual. learn the concept first, and then learn the scripting language. without learning the concept first, you won’t never master the program ““ this is a principle. go to www.kixtart.org and get yourself acquainted with this scripting software. you will love it.

Windows Powershell is the new kid in the town on the scripting language arena. it is a command line scripting language aimed to help IT Professionals to achieve better control of their tasks and productivity. I must confess that I am not a master of Powershell but is a scripting language I’m very interested in to learn. I have it installed on my Windows XP machine, and play around with it when I have time, but I have never used it in a production environment.

Autoit is a free BASIC like scripting language to automate Windows GUI tasks, and many others. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying “runtimes” required