I do a ton of vbs/shell scripting and dabble in HTML every once in a while when I need to but I've never gotten around to writing an HTA until recently. They can be very useful and now that I have started working with them I can think of a bunch of old vbs scripts that could be improved by making them HTAs instead.

Microsoft has a pretty decent overview of HTAs but it's still a bit bare.

Anyway, the HTA I am working on is to help setup collections in SMS that are limited to specific groups in Active Directory. My current client has both AD and SMS split up by business unit. So any time we need to create a new package in SMS, we have to create 20 groups in AD and then create 20 collections that are tied to those specific groups. It is quite time consuming (multiple hours from what I am told) and it is also very easy for a typo to cause problems.

So the new HTA that I have written automates all of this. It has a nice form that you can fill out that allows you to put in the group name that you want to create and the collection name that you want to create. A couple of clicks and PRESTO! 15 seconds to accomplish what used to take a few hours. You can also just select specific business units if you don't want to create groups and/or collections for all of them.

I still have a little bit of cleanup to do but it is fully functional at this time. Next, I plan to improve on it to allow you to create advertisements for each entity. I've already done a bit of playing around and it is pretty easy to generate dropdown boxes that are populated with all of the collections and packages that are in SMS. It shouldn't be too tough to setup something that allows you to select a collection and package and create an advertisement for them.

I'll post the entire code when I get it cleaned up a bit. It relies on some XML to pull up the list of all of the business units and to store information on what OU each business unit uses. If you haven't dabbled in XML using VBS, I've created some generic functions that allow you to work with XML fairly easily.

Update: I tried to put in a screenshot but it didn't seem to work. I'll see if I can get one posted...