Microsoft CodePlex: 12 open source gems for every Windows admin

While it may seem antithetical to Microsoft’s image, free open source tools abound for Microsoft admins, many of which are hosted by Microsoft itself on CodePlex, the company’s free open source project hosting site.

The tools offered at CodePlex are diverse and often downright awesome. Whether you’re working with Windows, Windows Server, SharePoint, Exchange, you name it, CodePlex is a rich resource for filling out your Microsoft-based toolset — and at the right price: free.

The following 12 CodePlex projects are some of the best, but the site offers thousands of others that can benefit IT and developer pros alike. Happy hunting.

Remember the days of yore when you had to memorize the top 10 performance counters to pass a Microsoft certification exam for your MCSE? Then the real world hit and you didn’t know how to really use performance monitoring to track down an issue because you weren’t sure which objects/counters to collect and how to analyze them. Well, the Performance Analysis of Logs tool, aka PAL, helps quickly analyze performance data using a PowerShell script. One of the cool features is that it has built-in threshold files for most known Microsoft products, such as IIS, SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, BizTalk, and Active Directory.

Squiggle is a fun tool for smaller businesses that may not have Office 365 with Lync for communication. It’s a server-less LAN chat tool that is ready to use the moment you install it. In addition to being an IM tool for your LAN (or across multiple LANs if you need, although you’ll have to use the Squiggle Bridge for that), you can use it for file transfer, voice chat, and more. It also has chat and status history, emoticons, audio alerts, and tray pop-ups (that you can turn on/off), among many other features.

RamHook is a little different from the others in this list. It’s an open source keystroke logging application that provides the ability to capture and record all keyboard input to a file, and from my tests, it works pretty well. You can run it in hidden mode and upload the log file to a specified Web server. What’s odd, however, is that there are 0 ratings on the CodePlex site for this tool, but it has one of the higher download rates (currently 70K downloads). So, even if you aren’t looking to use this within your environment you may want to look for it being used by others.

ConfigMgr 2012 PowerShell Right-Click Tools are PowerShell console extensions for Configuration Manager 2012 (aka SCCM 2012), and they’re quite popular among Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager admins. It’s important to note that there are different types of right-click tools. If you search, you can find SCCM Right-Clicks developed by Rick Houchins; however, the PowerShell version has put added to CodePlex by Ryan Ephgrave. Many of the same Actions and Tools are offered in the PowerShell version. There is also a Console Tools menu for devices, a Collections menu, and other unique items.