Hi, I'm doing a project as part of my degree at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom on Domain Information Visualisation. As part of my research I need to find out what kind of issues system administrators have with their domains that could be solved by an interface collecting information for them and displaying it on screen in the most visual and useful way possible. One suggestion I got from a friend of mine who is a system administrator would be a ping function which displays the pings of all machines that are currently on the network and whether they have recently lost the ability to be pinged. Another one that was brought up in my previous year of study was a problem with persmissions which denied/allowed access to certain folders in a share that they should/shouldn't have access to due to permission assignments, and a helpful application might display a list of shares showing what groups and users have access to it and then what access they have to sub folders. I'm looking for a variety of different issues from system administrators from different environments and i'd really appreciate any input. Thanks! Paul Draper

Hi Paul,Thank you for posting in windows server forusm,i understand that you are taking up the task of finding out the issues that system adminstrators face in today world.I have a decent comment on this, with the release of windows 2008 R2 / windows 2008 much of the administrator tasks have been automated for eg: a) introducing powershell made system administrator life easy b) modified wmi namespace and one who is very much familiar with the wmi / vbscript person can perform most of the jobs pretty easy c) with modified driver framework , driver development has become cakewalk for system engineers to debug pretty easy and thanks to WDF.d) related to system administration we have now several utilities such as system central , MOM / SCOM , WSUS ( patch management )e) group policies for managing most of the jobsf) Ethereal / netmon 3 for managing or monitoring the network packetsg) perfmon for handling the performance of every possible object inwindows I would say if you would have asked this question 3 years back , possibly you could have tons of jobs to performIm not telling that everything is automated and nothing is left , its just a era of virtulization major giants like microsoft, vmware and citrix are playing vital role , i would suggest you to concentrate on administering these .

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate your informative response! I'll take this information into account. Thanks!