Jeff Huston at myITforum.com

I don't know about the rest of you, but walking a user through the Start menu to the Control Panel and then on to an SMS applet is too much for some of my end-users.

To get around this "problem", I've created a set of scripts that get copied down to each user's workstation during computer startup.  In addition, a script is run during the startup script to create/maintain a link on the Start menu with a keyboard shortcut to the main script.  This way, I only need to tell the users to press Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up a simple numeric menu and then type in the number of the option that I want them to run.

So far, I've got options for running the basic health scripts (some of which are run during computer startup anyway), displaying status of inventories and ITMU, launching the Systems Management or the Run Advertised Programs applets, and excuting particular actions from the Actions tab (kicking off inventories or policy downloads).

This "menu" provides a quick way for me to instruct a user to obtain information and pass it back to me.  For instance, how many users know how to get their IP address?  Using my tool, I tell them to press Ctrl+Shift+S, run menu item 4 (display key system information) and read me the data on line 9.  No more crazy directions (open up a command prompt, okay, click Start, click Run, it's the one down in the lower-right corner, no - that's the clock - the lower-right corner of the Start menu, type C-M-D and press Enter, no M as in Mike, type I-P-C-O-N-as in November-F-I-G and press Enter, now scroll up and look for the lines that say IP Address, keep scrolling up since that was your wireless card, etc.).

See the attached ZIP for some of these scripts.