Active Directory's Recycle Bin
Who hasn't from time to time wished that they could undo a user deletion, or just know when a particular directory object was deleted. While Microsoft has had a 'Recycle Bin' of sorts in Active Directory since Windows 2003, it wasn't until the release of Windows 2008 R2 that it has finally been usable.
If you are already using Windows 2008 R2, and have not looked at the new Recycle Bin options, go here to find out more:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392261(WS.10).aspx
This article is highly technical, but don't get turned off by the complexity of actually restoring a deleted object. Hyena has for years supported restoring deleted objects. To see what your current directory has deleted, just right click on your domain and select View Deleted Objects. The main change in Windows 2008's AD Recycle Bin is that more attributes can now be recovered making it more usable than in earlier Windows versions.
Hardware reporting using WMI
If you ever have the need to report on hardware information for computers on your network, Hyena's WMI features are going to come in handy.
Hyena comes with several popular WMI classes already configured for you, but if you don't see what you need, it's very easy to add new classes. Here is an example from a recent support query on how to display CD-ROM information for all computers on the network:
The first step is to see if there is a WMI class that can be used to get what you need. To determine what is available, you can either use your favorite Internet search engine, or by using Hyena's class Lookup feature. A sample search would be to use Google and search for: cd-rom drive WMI class. This example would find several Microsoft MSDN articles using the 'Win32_CDROMDrive' class.
To test this class to see if it provides the information you require, right-click on a computer, or selection of computers, and choose WMI > Execute Query. Then click the New button. Enter a name to help you recognize this query later (it will be saved in Hyena for further use) in the WMI Query Name box, and then enter the class name 'Win32_CDROMDrive' in the WMI Class box.
If you didn't know the name of the class or wanted to just see what might be available, you can use the Lookup class function.
Once the class is entered, click OK. In the window on the right side are the properties for this class; pick and choose the fields you want to display and add them to the Query Properties window on the left. You can choose all properties initially if you want to see what each produces and then come back to this dialog to remove those that you don't need.
Once you've added the properties you want, click the Execute Query button. At this point Hyena will retrieve the information from the selected computers and display it in the right-hand window where you can sort, filter, or send the data to Excel for further reporting.
The Enterprise Edition of Hyena is required for WMI reporting. Standard Edition users can use the Win32_Process (Processes) class to evaluate this functionality.
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Hyena v8.8 UPDATE
If you missed the v8.8 release announcement, the primary new feature in Hyena v8.8 is support for the new Windows 2.0 Task Scheduler used by Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Options include viewing all scheduled tasks on one or more computers, viewing tasks by folder location, showing running tasks, task termination and more.