As you've seen, the MMC provides a complete framework for creating custom tools that can be tailored to the needs of a wide range of users. For administrators, you could create custom consoles tailored for each individual specialty, such as security administration, network administration, or user administration. For junior administrators or Power Users, you could create custom consoles that include taskpads that help guide them by providing lists of common commands, and you can even restrict this list so that these individuals can perform only these commands.

Because custom consoles are saved as regular files, you can publish and distribute them as you would any other file. You could put the consoles on a network file server in a shared folder. You could e-mail the consoles directly to those who will use them. You could use Active Directory to publish the tools. You could even copy them directly to the Start menu on the appropriate computer as discussed previously.

In any case, users need appropriate access permissions to run the tasks and access the snapins. These permissions must be granted for a particular computer or the network. Keep in mind also that the MMC version shipped with Windows 2000 and previous versions of the Windows operating system will not run tools created using the MMC version that ships with Windows Server 2003 (MMC 2.0 version 5.2). This version runs on only Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.