Folks:

Are your user's tired of eating the same old DOS box for lunch ?

Want to add some pizazz to those boring old logon script dinners ?

Try Microsoft's new and improved MSAgent 2.0 ActiveX Control (c) !

Yes sir - for the price of one coffee per day ( well - ok, it's free ), you can add cartoon animation, audio, voice synthesis and voice recognition capabilities to those plain, old, dull logon scripts.

Only half-kidding here !

To use MS Agent 2.0 (ala Office Assistant without the fancy menus), go here, download, then install this package ...

http://activex.microsoft.com/activex/controls/agent2/MSagent.exe


You should already have Internet Explorer 4.0+ for this to work !

When done installing, check for this key in the registry ...

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Agent.Control.2

Then run this script ...

code:
break on

$agent_control = "agent.control.2"
$agent_name = "Merlin"
$agent_path = "c:\winnt\msagent\chars\$agent_name.acs"

$agent = olecreateobject ( "$agent_control" )

$= oleputproperty ( $agent, "connected", "s",
                       "1" )

$characters = val ( "&" + olegetproperty ( $agent, "characters" ) )

$= olecallfunc ( $characters, "load", "ss", 
                      "$agent_name", 
                      "$agent_path" )

$character = val ( "&" + olecallfunc ( $characters, "character", "s", 
                      "$agent_name" ) )

$rs = olecallfunc ( $character, "show" )

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "play", "s", 
                      "greet" )

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "play", "s", 
                      "gestureleft" )

sleep 5

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "think", "s", 
                      "Hi there %username% !" )

sleep 5

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "think", "s", 
                      "My name is $agent_name and "+
                      "this is your logon script ... "  )

sleep 5

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "think", "s", 
                      "Checking group membership ..." )

sleep 3

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "think", "s", 
                      "Mapping network drives ..." )

sleep 3

$= olecallfunc ( $character, "think", "s", 
                      "All done ... have a nice day !" )

?"pause..." gets $c

$= olereleaseobject ( $agent )

exit

If you have a sound card and want to try the text-to-speech (TTS) feature, change the "think" methods to "speak" methods.

For those courageous souls that actually try this out and get it to work - let me know what you think !

Shawn.

[This message has been edited by Shawn (edited 24 July 2000).]