Help convincing boss this is a useful tool

Before you spend money and time to create the scripts you might want to enumerate the problems with the existing system.

Pros to keep existing system:

1. It works well enough now
2. People are used to it
3. It's supported

Cons against DX

1. New cost
2. New technology (support of scripts)
   
3. Training
4. etc

What are the cons to the existing system and the pros you think DX will bring?

IMO, if it's just a matter of an "Ugly Menu", keep in mind that a corporate wallet has no eyes and doesn't care if it's ugly. It works perfectly and gets the job done. Cosmetics will seldom improve the bottom line in a situation like that.   

sad but true.

Good points, but the system has to be revamped, as it will not work properly in the new enviroment with Explorer.exe as the shell (throws error on every app launch). The guy who supported this menu has retired, and there is no Winbatch support here except for me and that is one big convoluted script. I have been directed to replace this with something similar in apperance that we can use for this and other uses.........and besides, its a tobacco company, we got fat wallets (or at least our lawyers do). I was hoping to utilize a few other features into this, some basic system info, a little clock, maybe like a secret key combo that will present a password prompt, if you have the password then you can unlock a command prompt to allow you to run various programs with elevated rights as needed. I could take it even further, and tie an rss feed to read off the latest headlines from our sharepoint site and any approved news sites. Basically if I have to learn a new scripting method I would prefer DX over Winbatch.

Exactly, unless of course it's an executive with limited intelligence than they usually like shiny things.

IMO, Phoon hit the nail on the head. Similar to Zubazs' suggestion you can whip up a basic spreadsheet cost analysis matrix fairly quickly. Is what your proposing going to improve efficiency by saving time, etc?

My question to you is are you getting paid to take on this additional responsibility? That is unless you're in the IT department than obviously it is!

In one position I did various audits that added $700k immediately to the bottom line of the company plus in my normal area of responsibility discovered over $250k in unaccounted inventory. Which do you think was the focus of the owner? On my way out the door I pointed out that both areas were the responsibility of the controller. Surprisingly she was fired within three months after I quit.

SFE taking on responsibilities that you're not paid for may be appreciated but, that's not the name of the game. I've been there...appreciation fades but, money talks.

So, from the feedback it sounds like you guys don't think this product would be well suited to do any serious work with...

No one said that it wouldn't be a good tool.  Based on your initial question any tool may not be needed or funded or supported.  It appeared that you had your cart before the horse and we wanted to help you get things in order so you had a better chance at being successful.

Can DX do what you describe (vaguely)?  Yes, I believe it can.
Would I do it myself? No.  I'd contract it out to one of the DX developers that hang out here.

Not trying to start or continue a flame war, but I asked for ideals on scripting, not on preparing my business case for a particular piece of software. I am evaluating many options in completing this request. I have toyed around with DX for sometime and have really enjoyed the functionality of some of the gadgets the community has produced (and was very impressed with the support of the community). I thought it would be nice if I could leverage this to improve the experience for the end users and provide added functionality. If the product will work, I can make a successful business case for it.

My boss saw some of the stuff I was playing with and asked if it could be used to revamp our antiquated menu system. I was just curious if anyone had made or attempted to make a dynamic shortcut menu based off of a network config file. My boss is rather dimwitted and is easily impressed with shiny things, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to give him something both shiny and functional.

As for the Pro's and Con's listed earlier:
Pro's for current System
1 - Current Menu does not work in Windows XP sp2
2 - Keep new menu similar enough so no training is required.
3 - Support Retired - I'm a Winbatch Novice
Con's against DX
1 - New Cost - if it works as advertised, not an issue.
2 - New technology support - beats old technology support.
3 - Training - Both Winbatch and DX would pretty much have to be self taught by looking at others examples

Pro's for DX
1 - Is really shiny.
2 - Can provide more information than just a square box with six little boxes to start processes.
3 - All the stuff on the DesktopX Enterprise webpage - easy and powerful to create kiosk, secure corporate desktop, etc.
4 - Supports corporate standard scripting methods. VB is in, Winbatch is out.
5 - Is really shiny.
6 - "Great" community support.
7 - Corp Version does not require proprietary dll's to be preinstalled for standalone exe's to run.
8 - Did I mention its really shiny.

Anyway thanks for the replies, I've got a working mock up running, it's just not looking at the network file to get the program list, everything is hardcoded.

Title of Post...


---------


I guess we misunderstood...

You're most likely going to have to use WMI for this. It appears to be more functional in regards to network scripting but, their's lot's of resources out there in various programming forums. Haven't done any scripting in that area myself but, have seen many examples out there.

Is it as powerful as Winbatch? I can't say as I haven't really used it but, I'm thinking it's just a friendly face to writing batch files, etc than what is natively available. On that point alone DesktopX is equally as powerful & more so because you have the GUI abilities.

Obviously you could even do it within WSH (vbscript,jscript, etc) and you could adjust the font's used within the corresponding input/message boxes. I'm thinking this would actually take a little more time to implement than using desktopX.

The other pro is that the average production worker's age is usually skewed towards closer to retirement so, have the ability to adjust size/colours is also a big plus from an ergonomic perspective.

Just some thoughts. Check out Tek Tips VBScript forums maybe there are some examples for you.