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Nir Sofer has been offering useful utilities for IT pros since 2001. It seems he is still not getting tired of building new free tools because he just published MMCSnapInsView. The tool is relatively simple, but I think every Windows admin will find it useful.
You probably know that many management tools exist on Windows systems that you can only launch after you add them as a snap-in to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). To do so, you can type mmc.exe in Start search and then, in the MCC, you have to click File > Add / Remove Snap-in.
Adding a snap-in to MMC
This way, you also get an overview of the available MMC-based tools on the Windows computer. Many of those tools are shipped with Windows. You can add other snap-ins from Microsoft, such as the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), and many third-party vendors also build their admin tools for the MMC.
MMCSnapInsView’s name indicates that Nir Sofer probably sees his new tool mostly as a snap-in viewer. However, I think the real value of the tool is that you can use it as an MMC snap-in launcher. You can start many of those tools through the Administrative Tools folder (Control Panel\System and Security\Administrative Tools). However, not all tools show up there. This means that, if you need one of the other tools, you first have to add the snap-in manually to the MMC, which I always find quite cumbersome.
MMCSnapInsView is a standalone tool, so you can run it from your USB or cloud drive on any computer to get a list of all available snap-ins. It will display useful information about the snap-in, such as name, description, CLSID, DLL file, product name, company name, and file version.
MMCSnapInsView displays useful information about MMC snap-ins.
If you want to forward the details of a snap-in to someone, you just have to select it and then press CTRL+C to copy the information to the Windows clipboard. Alternatively, you can save the information to a file by pressing CTRL+S.
You can also access these commands through the context menu or the toolbar, where you will find additional features such as the ability to create an HTML report of all or selected snap-ins.
Snap-in information
By the way, on a Retina display, the toolbar icons were so small that they were hardly recognizable. Changing the Windows text size or the text size of specific items (title bar, icons, etc.) in the Windows display settings had no effect on the MMCSnapInsView icons. I think this is a typical example of how poorly Windows 10 (and all other Windows versions) sometimes handles high-resolution screens. I have never had such a problem on a Mac. Of course, it is partly the developer’s fault.
Anyway, the dot-sized icons in the toolbar shouldn’t prevent you from using MMCSnapInsView. As mentioned above, it is a great MMC snap-in launcher. If you intend to use the tool for this purpose, you might want to remove all columns except the snap-in name.
MMCSnapInsView as an MMC snap-in launch tool
To run a snap-in, you can just start typing its name. After you select it, you have to press F2. Unfortunately, pressing ENTER or double-clicking will only display the snap-in’s information.
After the UAC dialog window, MMC will launch with the corresponding snap-in. If you don’t always want to confirm the UAC prompt, you can run MMCSnapInsView as an administrator. You will find this setting under the tool’s help menu. CTRL+F11 works as well.
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