Yeah, to my mind, the only way to "EXPAND" a scripting language is through the use of COM/OLE. KiX and WSH both can be expanded with vendor and third-party snapins. But the OLE support in KiXtart (the old OLExxx functions) only provide about 80% of OLE functionality. It's missing some important (syntacical) features like nested object references and indexed properties. Add to that - the OLE functions are tough to use and understand and that KiXtart OLE doesn't even work on Windows 9x !!!

So that's why I ranked EXPANDABILITY as WSH,KIX,SL (in that order) ...

OLE expandability is important for Windows 2000 (I think) mostly because you'll want access to the Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) and to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) ... I mean, you can probably get by without these "goodies" but man - the power these services provide are beyond belief... granted maybe more so in administrative scripts than in logon scripts ...

KiXtart 2001 will have greatly improved COM support in version 4.0 - approaching that of WSH - but like we all know - it ain't done yet and KiXtart 2001 might take a "RELIABILITY" hit on this in the short term. WSH COM is tried and true.

FLEXIBILITY is a category that means "what can you do with what you've got". One can't remove OLE totally from this equation because a lot of what WSH provides is implemented as COM objects (that get installed along with WSH). I kinda figured that just about anything you can do in KiXtart, you can also do in WSH. But I had to give the edge to WSH on this for the following reasons ...

1) More variable types - floating point, mutildimensional arrays, etc.

2) You get two languages to (seamlessly) choose from - VBScript or JavaScript

3) Much, much better file i/o support (mega faster too!!!)

But just in terms of pure logon script functionality (groups,maps,pokes) maybe KiXtart has a slight lead (with it's specialized functions) - but big picture - WSH has more generic "FLEXIBILITY" ...

Like I said - all this is based more on my gut feel than anything else - I'd still like to see someone (like yourself) evolve another table for comparision. Especially if they use ScriptLogic software of have any direct experiences with using WSH as a logon script ...

-Shawn

[This message has been edited by Shawn (edited 27 June 2001).]