What Tools Do You Use for Windows Automation?

If you do any work in an IT support role, knowing how to use at least of one of the following tools is a requirement. The amount of repetitive work done in tasks like imaging or testing begs for automation and these tools can get the job done easily.

• Perl has been a must have tool for systems administrators for almost two decades now. Perl’s way of making the easy things easy and the difficult possible, its use for systems administration, network programming, and the vast library of code available from CPAN make it a top choice for prototyping, interfacing with other applications, data munging, and automating.
• Kixtart is free tool that was designed internally at Microsoft Netherlands as a skunkworks project mainly intended for login scripts, but has been greatly expanded. Interacting with AD, WMI, and the registry is extremely easy with kix. Additionally, it has a great user base that has created hundreds of “functions” that can do almost anything that you need to do.
• AutoIT shares many of the same benefits of kix, but makes automating simulated keystrokes, mouse movement, and window/control manipulation very easy. Using AutoIT in a testing environment, for imaging, or for creating distributable executables makes this a very valuable tool.

What tools do you use for Automation?