Service Explorer

Service Explorer will help you simultaneously manage Services and Tasks on multiple servers and desktops on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 networks from one console.

One of the least secure areas of a network today is service accounts, which are created for specific purposes, such as backups, given Domain Admin privileges, and, all too frequently, a very insecure password. These accounts are often neglected and it’s not unusual for an account to have the same password years later.

It can take hours of work in an enterprise-wide network to look through each computer’s services to see if a service uses the service account whose password you need to change. The same would be true to change a service’s logon account, change the startup type, or manage accounts used for scheduled tasks.

Service Explorer is a powerful and easy-to-use solution to address these time-consuming security problems. It provides centralized management of all your services and scheduled tasks from a single point – without the need for agents or scripts.

Service Explorer quickly searches your entire network for services to be managed based on criteria such a service name, description, and logon account. You can search an entire domain, or just computers in a specific Organizational Unit. The selected search criteria can be saved for repeated use at a later date. Service Explorer is supplied with a number of predefined searches for instant access to some common administrative tasks. Running as a multi-threaded application, the discovery time to find all services to be managed is significantly reduced, which ensures consistently fast and granular search results over time. To maintain security, only those accounts whose passwords are over a certain age truly need to be changed. Security Explorer provides the ability to quickly view the age of a given service account’s password, change it centrally, and then push that password change to all services running under that account.

Complete Account Management Once a list of services and tasks matching the search criteria has been returned, the service accounts used can be modified in much the same way a single service would be modified on a local server by changing the service account and/or password. A key difference with Service Explorer is that this single change can affect hundreds of servers throughout your enterprise, all from a single centralized console. Once you’ve made the necessary account changes, Service Explorer can be used to then restart the services on all of the affected servers. Service Explorer also gives administrators the ability to change the startup type of services across the enterprise. As with the password change scenario, enabling or disabling a service found on multiple servers would be just as easy and fast.

Service Security Management With Service Explorer you can modify security on service access control lists (ACLs).This unique capability provides the granularity and control needed to modify the security on system services. Viewing and editing service ACLs is fast and easy. Now, managing service security no longer requires giving users unnecessary rights.

Task Management Service Explorer also provides unequaled management of scheduled tasks. Tasks can be searched for using the same feature sets as those used for services. Once found, account credentials and task properties can all be managed and modified centrally using the same interface. With Service Explorer, your overall network security and performance will improve dramatically.