Auto populating custom properties for visio website

[NoFearDJB]

Are there any ways to auto populate the "custom properties" of a PC object in
visio? I'm working on a summer project for my university and I have access to
the entire network resources such as active directory, etc. Any suggestions?
I wish to be able to somehow pull information such as "serial number" "IP
address" "MAC address" "computer name" etc. from the computers remotely via
our network. Any suggestions would be great as I would like to avoid manually
entering 10 entries or so per computer as there are about 100-200 computer I
will be including. Thanks in advance.

 

[Al Edlund]

Well it comes down to build, buy, or lease. There of course are tools out
there that can do some of the heavy lifting for you such as the LanSurveyor
tool in the Visio 2003 Resource Kit. You can also write some code to do the
data capture using flows such as WMI, SNMP, LDAP/ADSI. There are examples of
that code in the scripting forums on MSDN. The next thing is to save the
data and there are also examples of that in the scripting forums. The next
step would be to put the data into the custom properties and for that you
can use the visio sdks. Understand the capture of the data programatically
has a preassumption that the necessary flows have been turned on (including
any necessary firewall filters) and populated in each of the devices under
test (DUTs). Unfortunately they are rarely installed/activated as part of
the default installations so there is a very significant piece of work to go
get the systems prepared for such an undertaking. The good news is that it
lays a foundation for some real systems management.
Al