Get on the Bus with Microsoft

NSLC

This evening I had the pleasure of attending a special Microsoft event hosted just a few minutes away from my office.  A team of Microsoft employees are currently traveling across Europe on the Microsoft Get on the Bus tour.  York doesn’t really strike people as being the heart of UK ICT, but Andrew Bettany of the University of York managed to arrange for the tour to swing by the National Science Learning Centre and it was a fantastic opportunity.

The evening began with a some drinks and a bite to eat whilst being able to speak to some of the event supporters and other ICT professionals.  After an hour or so it was into the main lecture theater to begin the seminars.  First up was Tjeerd Veninga who gave a bit of an overview of some key features of Windows 7 which was launched just a week ago.  His presentation was a good start, but there were a few issues with the laptop he was using to demonstrate on proving that even Microsoft staff sometimes have problems with live software demonstrations.

Get on the bus - Windows Mobile?

Tjeerd was followed by an energetic David Elfassy who gave an excellent overview of Exchange Server 2010.  Whilst there was no specific release date given the previous information suggested it would be in the second half or 2009 – which is where we are and Microsoft employees are out “selling” it.  I was really impressed by some of the features and ideas that Microsoft had put into this version that would support a number of areas I’m interested in.

The business continuity and resilience offered by the use of database availability groups and the linking to cloud based services sounds appealing.  The E-discovery options and new archiving opportunities covers off another couple of areas I’ve been particularly interested in and this very much puts the product head and shoulders above Exchange 2007 (which one would hope with a new version).

Last up from the American crew was Liberty Munson who took an impromptu quick fire Q&A on Microsoft Certification and exams.  I’ve not specialised in Microsoft systems and so my knowledge of the Microsoft exams is somewhat high level, but after this I will admit I have a little greater insight.  Her reputation of knowing everything about the Microsoft courses and exams was put to the test and only once was she tripped up … but she promised to find the answer!

Photo call for the bus crew

At this point the American crew made their escape back to the bus and during the brief break everyone waved them off and wished them well for the rest of their tour.

York wave off the bus

Once back inside some of the UK based experts took over and we began with James O’Neill and a look at Windows Server 2008 R2.  Again lots of interesting stuff here building on the original server 2008 OS with some interesting features around power saving and scaling up through virtualisation and better support for the ever progressive hardware.  A couple of tips around enabling the Active Directory recycle bin and getting to grips with PowerShell 2 will certainly not be forgotten by anyone who attended.

Next up was David Overton talking about SBS (Small Business Server) 2008 – 1 year on.  Whilst I’ve never used SBS directly I’ve attended a few events where it had been discussed and it was interesting to get a view of a different scale of server and the sorts of things incorporated to make the management simpler.  However I do wonder how risky trusting everything to an SBS server can be and also why these simplifications aren’t applied to Server 2008?

Finally James was back up for a second run and by this point we were running quite late.  A whistle stop tour of some tips for using Windows 7 was the finale for the evening and whilst I wasn’t fortunate enough to receive one of the limited number of Windows 7 Ultimate given away at the event I have been running the final release candidate for some time at home and will be sure to try out some of these in the not too distant future.

All in all a thoroughly enjoyable evening and an event which was simply too short.  I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the event and

DokuWiki Sync

I’m been a huge fan of DokuWiki for many years now.  Since I worked in a huge corporate development environment where structured documentation was hard to set-up I managed to pull a great number of resources together using DokuWiki and make it available to my whole team.  The culture was such that I was pretty much the only person keeping it up to date … but that’s a different story.

I’m now using it to with a portable web server and DropBox to keep it synchronised across multiple Internet connected devices – which works as I’m the only person contributing to this one.  But I can see a need (in my current organisation) for one team to move away from individual wikis (or more precisely TiddlyWikis) that are manually copied centrally from time to time; and towards a set-up which is a shared wiki – the way wikis were meant to be.

Whilst our latest pilot of SharePoint would certainly fulfil the sharing criteria, it won’t allow all users to work in the way they need to.  The reason for this is Internet connectivity.  Not everywhere and everyone has an always on 100% reliable connection.  Just try travelling on a cross-country train for example.  This is a big issue for an increasingly mobile workforce like ours.

The solution is certainly non-trivial as there are synchronisation issues to deal with.  Even if you had a wiki that you split into spaces for individuals you would find that as well as the potential for producing fragmented content (e.g. two users posting complimentary information in two separate locations), there is also the issue of how to automatically rebuild search indexes.

I’m always on the look out for something to tackle this sort of issue and the nearest I’ve ever seen until now has been SocialText’s TiddlyWiki inspired check-out solution.  But now it looks like the solution may have been right under my nose for some time and I’ve never noticed.

DokuWiki is based on a simple file system structure rather than a database structure.  Not hugely scalable in performance terms, but a little inefficiency on something inherently straight forward like this means that faster hardware can be applied to mitigate the situation.  DokuWiki’s author Andrea Gohr has developed a synchronisation plugin for DokuWiki that seems to take care of everything.  Whilst it won’t merge multiple-author edits (i.e. the original page was updated online and a new edit based on the old one has been created offline) automatically it will flag them for manual edit. For me I wouldn’t want to risk the loss of information or the creation of a nonsense page through automatic handling so really this is a non-issue.  Everything else seems to be handled including the usual DokuWiki login based restricted access, separation of name spaces, etc.

I’m not sure why I’ve never come across it before but now I have I’m met with another quandary.  Before I recommend this internally I’d like to try it out and given it a field test of some sort.  However Andreas has chosen an interesting experiment for releasing this particular plugin.

The plugin was written many months ago and he is asking for donations towards its release.  When released it will be available to everyone to download and use for free and will effectively be released under the usual GPL2 licensing agreements.  He’s most of the way there in terms of donations, but not quite so I can’t yet evaluate it just yet.  Given the financial processes we have in place for purchasing things from sources who aren’t preferred suppliers (i.e. directors and credit cards vs. accounts and purchase orders) and the current pressures on the public sector during these financially unstable times I don’t feel as though I can provide enough of a business case to try this when we’ve invested so recently in a system based around very similar collaboration for the whole organisation.

For now I’ll have to hang in there and keep an eye on the total and this interesting “Liberationware” experiment*.

* I was going to use the term “Ransomware” but according to Wikipedia that’s not the right definition!…

Evidence Net Workshop 2

Last week I attended a second workshop on Evidence Net.  It was launched a few weeks ago at The Higher Education Academy Annual Conference 2009 and has been growing in use across the HE sector ever since.

The previous Evidence Net workshop was aimed at identifying the sorts of features that the second phase of the Evidence Net site might have.  This workshop was very much aimed at prioritising the suggested features.

The workshop began with an activity to get some idea of people’s initial thoughts around some of the ideas that were to be discussed later in the day.  People were asked to stand in a line with their position representing how strongly they felt about a topic.  This sparked off a bit of discussion and the day then started in earnest.

The next activity was a short listing of the feature sets by each person.  A summation of the votes was carried out and this was used to specify the prioritisation of the features.  The top feature identified was functionality around adding resources to Evidence Net.

The workshop was split into groups to discuss how the addition of resources should take place.  This included not only articles, case studies, papers, etc. but also things like events and collaborative networks.  The groups came up with details about how things should work and some basic workflows and ideas for things the interface should offer to an Evidence Net user and an Evidence Net administrator.  The workshop spent a good while discussing the options raised and how this would affect the usage of the site.

With time fast disappearing the afternoon kept the group set-up but with each group tackling just one of the next four or five priority sets.  Each group presented their ideas and the whole group discussed each for a few minutes.

One factor that kept cropping up was that of having users login.  As well as helping to identify and log who would be contributing what it just as importantly formed the basis of allowing the site to deliver customised content such as recommendations and news about updates.

Overall it was again a very lively workshop which I hope everyone got a positive experience from attending.  I’m sure that the Evidence Net team came away with lots of useful views and ideas that will keep them busy analysing for weeks to come.   The workshop is just one of several second stage activities that the Evidence Net team are carrying out and I would guess that the  other activities are likely in the main to identify the same sorts of features.

These wide user base information gathering activities should help to ensure that the best possible range of input is obtained to develop the next phase of this resource and I’m looking forward to seeing what impact we’ve had on defining the feature set of Evidence Net phase 2 and from my personal perspective the technologies and solutions identified to deliver what is potentially quite a complex but rich set of requirements.  It will almost certainly be a phased delivery but the final version will surely be an exceptional educational resource.

The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009

It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to devote any time to blogging. It has just been a really busy time for me. However I’m currently sat on a train between Edinburgh and York so it’s an excellent opportunity to have a bit of a catch up. Specifically I wanted to post something about one of the biggest things I’ve worked on recently – The Higher Education Academy Conference 2009.

The conference took place between Tuesday 30th June and Thursday the 2nd of July in Manchester at University Place on some of the hottest days of the summer so far. I was on hand for the second two of the four days (Monday 29th June was the set-up day) as part of the events team or more accurately as one half of the IT support contingent for the conference. Previously I’d only attended an Academy conference as a day delegate and it was a valuable experience seeing the other side of the story.

The support mainly consisted of ensuring that the presenters and speakers running workshops were having no problems with the laptops and projectors that were set-up in the seminar rooms. For the most part people were just fine, and there was the odd more interesting issue where a video would not display correctly (as it required an unusual codec) or where a presenter was having trouble displaying notes on the laptop and something else on the projector screen (setting up Microsoft PowerPoint in presentation mode or reconfiguring screens for desktop extension rather than cloned display). There were however a number of last minute requests for audio speakers and software installations that I had not expected, but with something of this scale involving this many external presenters it is difficult to account for every eventuality. I was impressed that the majority of presenters who had issues raised them prior to the start of the workshops having taken the breaks between sessions to get to the seminar rooms and test their presentations. This certainly made my job a little less stressful as trying to fix the more obscure issues in front of a room of people and knowing that there are a couple of other rooms needing your attention a.s.a.p. can be a little taxing on a warm day.

Overall though the preparation carried out by my colleagues both in ICT and in the events team allowed me to hit the ground running and pick things up with the minimum of fuss. I’m sure that’s no suprise to most people, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a few of the ideas and best practices that were used or might well be used in the future in case they can be of use to you in your endeavours.

• Set the wallpaper of the PCs being used to display the contact details for IT support.
• Ensure that all portable equipment is secured within rooms – use cable locks not just door locks.
• Be generous with power saving modes. By all means use them and look after the planet, but make sure the presenter doesn’t have to press a button every few minutes to keep the screen saver from kicking in.
• Label equipment with unique identifiers and any basic instructions – e.g. logon details.
• Have presenters send their electronic content to you at least a few days before they present and check that they work on the presentation machines – particularly if they have video content.
• Copy all content to all presentation machines during the event set-up so that if there are any technology or room swaps everything is still available and ready.
• Send presenters a check list of things they can request for their presentation and details of what is supplied by default.
• Ask presenters to provide a packaged copy (e.g. Package for CD in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007) as this reduces font missing resource related headaches.
• Examine carefully what your laptops and projectors can do. Many projectors for example include a basic audio speaker (suitable for smaller rooms) and a USB connection and remote controls to control not only the projector but also the computer too.
• For every projector and laptop add in a set of audio speakers as full multimedia presentations are practically the norm.
• Carry a USB flash drive.
• Think about what equipment people might need – laptop, projector, presentation controller, DVD player, speakers, microphone, projector screens.
• Think about room layouts -
  • Where will the presenter be?
  • Where does the projector need to be to project a large enough image?
  • What will the projector and PC sit on?
  • Where will the audience sit and will they be in groups or rows?
• Power sockets will inevitably be in the wrong place – take extension reels and multiple socket extensions.
• Take adapters for computers that may not have a VGA output (e.g. DVI and mini-DVI on Apple Mac devices).
• Consider Internet access ahead of time. If you’re relying on WiFi then make sure it is available reliably everywhere you need it.
• If you’re using something new (especially technology) then make sure you give it a test run on location to ensure it works.
• Take hazard warning tape and trip guards to venues to allow health and safety compliance.
• Take spares of everything.

Another thing I found interesting was the use of Twitter at the conference. A couple of hash tags (#HEA09 and #ACADEMYCONF09) came into play for the conference. I’ve seen it used (from the Twitter end) successfully for conferences and events before, but these have always been technology focussed events. This conference however was focussed on HE and so the take up of tweeting on the conference was limited to those who were already familiar with Twitter and hash tags. There were certainly some who were more prolific than others, but given that this was not a technology focussed conference I was impressed at the general buzz on Twitter for the event and I do wonder if even more people posted tweets without hash tags as not everyone who uses Twitter knows what they are/are for? As Web 2.0 (and all that comes after) becomes more integrated with our culture I’m sure this form of communication will improve. It will be interesting to see how the Academy uses Twitter post-conference. I personally hope that it doesn’t end here.

Unfortunately I didn’t have chance to sit in on any of the debates, sessions or workshops. I managed to get some first hand overviews whilst making conversation and addressing some of the IT related issues and I managed to speak to a few of the exhibitors. So if you want to know more about the conference I’ll have to direct you to some other resources. In addition to the Twitter conversations…

• HE Academy Official Conference Web Site
• Annual Conference Forum
• Blog post – Reflections of YouTestTube.Com at HEA09

Server Reorganisation

It’s been rather busy of late and I’ve only just got chance to start posting again.  So I thought I’d best begin by posting about the weekend of the 8th, 9th and 10th of May.

We had spent several weeks planning the work for this weekend including having the first ICT team away day.  The aim of the day was to carry out a number of infrastructure changes to position us to be able to overcome a few historical obstacles and to position us for the future.

Friday 8th.
The work began at noon on Friday with the ICT team updating the software on the organisation’s servers.  Along with all of the usual Microsoft updates, there were a number of other administrative updates to go alongside.  This was also a valuable oportunity to have a good trawl through the system logs looking for anything else that might mean the servers were not running optimally.

Server Room Cabling

Saturday 9th.
Saturday was predominantly a lift and shift day with four of us working in the tiny chilled server room to re-rack the majority of the servers into contiguous blocks to make space to rack more servers.  Incorporated into this work we racked up four new servers and a disk array – more about the specific purpose of these in future posts I hope.

Along with the physical arrangement of the servers, the work also began on recabling and relabeling the servers.  This was further complicated by the necessity to rack up the servers to a Raritan KVM and our UPS systems and an increase in numbers of servers certainly makes it more difficult to keep on top of this.

Sunday 10th.
After completing the cabling and labeling and having some discussions about strategies for software deployment for some upcoming end user hardware updates the day drew to a close with an afternoon of deploying a new network administration password and general testing.

Whilst not without issue, the weekend’s work has now opened up new opportunities for how to better use the ICT infrastructure to support the work of the Academy.

EvidenceNet Workshop

For the second time this week I’ve been out of the office and working in one of York’s many hotels.  This time rather than a team away day I was at The Grange Hotel attending the first of a series of workshops on Evidence Net.

Evidence Net is a service that The Higher Education Academy is developing to support the process of using evidence based research to inform practice in the HE Sector.

The workshop was attended by a number of Academy staff with an aim to generate lots of ideas and to pull together a common understanding of the sorts of things the second phase of the Evidence Net web site should be looking to deliver.  The morning was spent setting out some of the background and establishing a base of common understanding.  From this a set of objectives for the work was outlined through some combining people’s individual thoughts of what the objectives should be and to a limited extent a start on what sort of measures could be used to measure the success of this.

After lunch, the approach turned to team discussions and sets of functional requirements were drawn together though  “solution-mode” was purposefully avoided by an approach of focussing on what was needed rather than any technologies that could deliver it.

The day seemed to work well and I look forward to the opportunity for the ICT team to feed into the rest of this project.

ICT Team Away Day – April 2009

Today has been a very busy day!  An early start saw me pulling together a variety of thoughts and pieces of information in preparation for the Higher Education Academy’s ICT team away day.  This was the first away day the team had ever had and there was certainly some apprehension as to how the day would pan out.

The aims of the day were two-fold.  In the first part the team was to engage in some tea building and learning activity based around supporting team planning exercises.  The second part was to put this into practice by planning out some upcoming work.

The day began with a nine thirty start at the Pavilion Hotel located in Fulford not far from the Academy’s York office where the ICT team are based.  The first task of the day as ever were some introductions and this was the first opportunity for the team to meet the consultants from Synergi who were to facilitate the day – Umran Amin and Ammaran Razaq.

After the introductions and a discussion around what people’s expectations for the day were out of the way the team got down to the business of getting to grips with a methodology developed by the prestigious Edward de Bono – The Six Thinking Hats.

This methodology categorises six different styles of thinking and provides a framework for sequentially applying the styles in a flexible way to allow people to pull towards a common goal in a common way that shifts and changes through the process to ensure an outcome is arrived at by the group.

For anyone who hasn’t come across the methodology, the hats are coloured and correspond to the following thinking styles:

• Blue Hat - Management and process control.
• White Hat - Data and facts focussed.
• Green Hat – Creativity.
• Red Hat – Instinct and gut feeling.
• Yellow Hat – Positive aspects and benefits.
• Black Hat – Potential pitfalls and negative aspects.

Six Thinking Hats of Edward de Bono

With an overview of the methodology the team set to using this to plan a significant piece of maintenance work. During May the team will be undertaking a piece of work over several days that will see a full reorganisation of the Academy York office’s server racks and the addressing of a number of bottle necks and issues that the team have identified.

The applicati0n of the methodology first looked at how the work could be structured and from this each area was picked up in turn and explored using the same methodology to flesh out the plans.  The day rounded off at a little after five with a large amount of planning agreed and specified.

Hopefully the effort put into the day will reap the reward in the successful development and implementation of the final plan and we’ll be able to use the methodology for future team planning sessions.

Death of the iPod?

A little while ago I received a request for the installtion of Spotify on a work computer. I’d not heard of it at this point so I did some research and discovered that it was a piece of software that linked you to a massive library of music on the Internet. After a bit of discussion in trying to ascertain what the business case was for installing this to a work computer it faded away.

With greater news in the media recently I decided that I’d give it a go myself and see what all the fuss was about. A free version is available that allows you to listen to any track in the library, and you just get a few adverts every now and then – though a regular payment can eliminate these for uninterrupted listening. The application itself is very simple and is suspsciously similar to iTunes in styling which I guess makes it more familiar to a lot of people.

The quality of the audio was quite reasonable on my computer and in all for a free system it really does seem too good to be true. So is this the beginning of the end for the iPod and the death of the personal storage based media player?

Many journalists seem to think so but I would suggest that it is not.

I don’t think it will be long before the centralised storage access will become more available. The connectivity of devices such as the iPod touch (Wifi) and the iPhone (3G) mean that always on connectivity will allow access to these sorts of systems. This will be another leap forward in personal mobility of media, but there are a number of points that I believe will continue to see personal storage in effect (though probably combined with an online central storage option).

Power

The power requirements for streaming audio to your pocket device is such that battery technology will still have a long way to go. Imagine trying to get several hours play out of an iPod shuffle that is connecting to 3G. How efficient is that battery going to be?

Signal

It is realtively difficult to maintain signal quality in small devices with internal aerials and whilst it is obviously more commonplace these days with mobile phones to have internal aerials than it was say four or five years ago what is the transmission quality actually like? how often have you had a signal that wasn’t quite clear enough? That’s just on audio too which has been around for quite some time. Imagine the difference in data streaming. I assume some sort of buffering will be employed to resolve this, but if it isn’t buffering an entire track you may find that it just pauses at times detroying the listener’s experience.

Taking this further what happens in areas of no signal such as if you’re out hiking or possibly even on a plane or passing through a long tunnel on a train? A total lack of signal availability would effectively destroy your chance of listening to anything.

Range

The range of available tracks is growing all of the time. One of the first things I did when I tried Spotify was to try and find some tracks that I really liked to see if it had them listed. I would say that it managed to list about 50% of them … I didn’t count the karaoke only versions or covers recorded by another artist. Whilst I admit that this is going to grow extensively with a greater take up of such a service I do think that there’s always going to be something that isn’t available on it that I will want and in all likelihood will be likely to have or be able to get hold of in another format.

Podcasts

I actually rarely listen to music on my iPod unless I’m in the car. I more regularly listen to the radio (through an add-on to my iPod… I miss the inbuilt one on my old iRiver) or podcasts. It is not uncommon for me to re-listen to old podcasts (particularly technology related ones like Gartner and ones by the BBC). Some podcasts are always available for download, but others are subject to licensing restrictions which means that they are available for a limited period of time (e.g. BBC). Being able to store these allows me to listen to them in the way that I want.

So whilst I’m sure I could create a system that would allow me to securely stream media from a personal store (on-line or from my home) across the Internet I think that the limitations on power and connectivity will ensure that on device storage will continue to exist. I do think however that we will see more connected devices that allow access to on-line services like Spotify.

Sharing Ideas and Good ICT

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation I’d been trying to put together for the best part of six months and this evening I’ve sent it on to the users who attended and who were unable to attend but showed an interest.  I realised at this point I hadn’t actually blogged about it so I thought I might put together a little post about it.

The aim was simply to share some ideas and some bits of ICT that could help people do their jobs quicker/better/cheaper/economically/more easily.  Many of these were based upon queries from users and solutions  found or in some cases pre-emptively finding options for issues that have yet to be raised.

A note was put into the staff briefing and some posters put up around the office to try and get people along to the presentation.  The attendance was surprisingly low and it’s unfortunate in terms of what people missed out on but I thought I’d highlight the areas that were discussed and some high level points on what was demonstrated and discussed.

The presentation was split into four main sections – software, hardware, web sites and engaging with the ICT team.

Software

• Skype
• Working with PDFs
  • Microsoft Office plug ins
  • PDF printers
  • PDF Bulder Toolkit
  • Drawloop.com
• Public Folders in Outlook

Hardware

• Photocopiers
  • Printing
  • Scanning
  • Secure printing & scanning
• Data Capture
  • Dictaphones
  • Digital cameras
  • DigiMemo
  • MIMIO
• Communication
  • Teleconferencing units
  • Audio/telephony cabling

Web Sites

• Collaboration
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • Google Docs
  • Etherpad
  • Writeboard
  • Dabbleboard
  • Mind Meister
  • Vyew
• Online Presentations
  • Instant Presenter
  • Microsoft Communications Server
  • Dim Dim
• Meeting Scheduling
  • Doodle
  • Meet-o-matic
• To Do Lists
  • To Do Ist
• File Sharing
  • Orbit Files

Engaging with ICT

• Service Desk
  • Queries
  • Training
• Invitation
  • Project meetings
  • Team meetings
• Communications
  • Presentations
  • Briefings
  • Mailings
  • Bulletins
  • Newsletters

I don’t plan on publishing the presentation widely as much of it is only directly relevant to Academy ICT users in the way it is presented, but the outline above gives an indication of the content and areas in which the user community is developing.

Hopefully some imminent developments might help create a greater sharing of such ideas and information within a community and build a better culture of knowledge sharing and management.

Processing a Folder of Files

A few days ago I was speaking to one of my users about creating some PDF files from Microsoft Word and securing them so that they can’t be copied or printed.  Rather than using expensive software from Adobe or a generic creator like CutePDF I recommended using the add-in for Word 2007 that Microsoft provide as it provides some useful accessibility options (thanks to JISC TechDis for highlighting that one to me).

Unfortunately the add-in doesn’t have an option to secure a PDF so that’s where using a tool like PDFTK can help.  Being a command line tool though and the user having to produce more than 100 PDFs meant that a little help could come in handy.   Making use of the select folder VBScript I refined a little while ago, I created a generic VBScript to take a folder selection from a user and a command line operation via a simply single line input box to then process every file in the folder using the command line.

A percentage symbol is used as a place holder for the file path to be substituted into and any file paths for the command line (with the exception of the substitution – %) should include double quotes where there are spaces in the path.

Option Explicit

Dim strFolder, strRootFolder, strBaseCommand

'Get the information and process it
strRootFolder = SelectFolder("Select folder containing files to be processed:")
strBaseCommand = InputBox("Enter the command line to run against all files." & vbCrLf & "Place a percentage symbol (%) where the filename will be substituted")
ProcessFolder strRootFolder

'------------
'SUB ROUTINES
'------------

'Identify each file in a folder and run the specified command against it.
Sub ProcessFolder(pstrFolder)
	Dim objCurrentFolder, objFile
	Dim colFilesInFolder
	Dim strCommand
	Dim objWSHShell, objFSO

	'Initialise
	Set objWshShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
	Set objFSO = Wscript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	Set objCurrentFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(pstrFolder)
	Set colFilesInFolder = objCurrentFolder.Files

	For Each objFile in colFilesInFolder
		strCommand = Replace(strBaseCommand,"%","""" & objFile.Path & """")
		objWSHShell.Run strCommand
	Next
End Sub

'---------
'FUNCTIONS
'---------

Function SelectFolder(pstrDialogLabel)
	'Select a folder
	Const BIF_returnonlyfsdirs   = &H0001
	Const BIF_editbox            = &H0010

	Dim objBrowseFolderDialog, objFolder, objFSO, objSelection
	Dim bBrowseForFolder

	Set objBrowseFolderDialog = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")

	bBrowseForFolder = true

	While bBrowseForFolder
		Set objFolder = objBrowseFolderDialog.BrowseForFolder (&H0, pstrDialogLabel, BIF_editbox + BIF_returnonlyfsdirs)

		'Check that something has been returned
		If IsValidFolder(objFolder) Then
			Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

			Set objSelection = objFolder.Self
			If objFSO.FolderExists(objSelection.Path) Then
				'A valid folder has been selected
				SelectFolder = objSelection.Path
				bBrowseForFolder = false
			Else
				'The selection is not a valid folder, try again...
				MsgBox objFolder.Title & " is not a valid folder, please select another folder" _
					, vbOKOnly & vbExclamation, "Invalid Selection"
			End If
		Else
			'Nothing was selected, so return a null string
			SelectFolder = ""
			bBrowseForFolder = false
		End If
	Wend
End Function

Function IsValidFolder(pobjFolder)
	'Check that we have a valid value
	'i.e. you can concatenate it to a string
	Dim strTest

	On Error Resume Next

	strTest = " " & pobjFolder

	If Err <> 0 Then
		IsValidFolder = false
	Else
		IsValidFolder = true
	End If

	On Error GoTo 0
End Function

As it stands the folder just processes a single folder for all files (which was what I wanted), but simple amendments could allow this script to cater for specific file types (or patterns) and sub folders (a recursive call in the ProcessFolder() routine would allow this).