About Administration Scripting

Scripting allows you to use the ISA Server administration objects to access and control policies and configurations for an enterprise or for any ISA array within an organization.

ISA administration scripting has a number of benefits, such as saving time on tasks that are repetitive or need to be carried out on a number of servers or arrays. Administration scripting has other advantages:

Simplifies configuration changes: With ISA you do not need to write code that accesses the Registry or Microsoft® Active Directory™ service because the Save and Refresh methods of the COM objects will save configuration changes for you. The objects thereby provide simple and comprehensive access to ISA configuration. The objects also use Active Directory in Windows® 2000 when available, while hiding the storage implementation details from the developer.

Maintains consistency: ISA object methods that set the values of multiple related properties with one method call will check whether the combinations of property settings are valid, and return errors if the properties are not set correctly. Consistency is maintained because scripts do not assign conflicting property settings.

Ensures that services receive changes: Most ISA administration objects have a Save method that stores changes. Services register to detect and use the new settings. This dynamic configuration allows services to receive notification of the changes without requiring the server to be stopped and restarted. Some changes will not take place immediately. For example, if a user is in an FTP session, revoking that user's FTP privileges will not cancel the current session. However, that user will not be able to request another FTP session.

Allows command-line and Windows scripting: Microsoft Windows Script Host is a language-independent scripting host for Microsoft ActiveX® scripting engines. It allows you to run ISA Server administration scripts from both the Windows desktop and the command prompt. For more information about Windows Script Host, see MSDN.

Real-time administration: You can create scripts that allow you to query and control the real-time state of your ISA Server arrays.

Task scheduling: Using scripts, tasks that must be performed on a regular basis can be scheduled to occur automatically. For example, you could create a script that would automatically back up configuration information.

Scripting interfaces: Scripts can be easily incorporated into HTML pages. By incorporating scripts into an HTML page, you can create a scripting interface to ease administrative tasks.

See Also

Cache Administration, ISA Administration Scripting