Why talk about PowerShell ?

By Nicolas BlankUncategorized

You might be wondering why I'm posting so much about PowerShell since I'm an Exchange MVP. I'm going to try and expand on this a little bit and add as much clarity as I can.

Jeffrey Snover has spoken about this a lot in his introductory sessions on PowerShell and I'd like to amplify this as well. PowerShell is CURRENTLY supported on the following to name a few:

          • Exchange 2007,
          • MOM 2007,
          • Virtual Machine Manager 2007,
          • Lotus Domino Transporter Suite,
          • Data Protection Manager,
          • Compute Cluster Tool Pack,
          • Windows Server,
          • Backup
          • Vista
          • Windows XP
          • SQL 2008

Notice Windows Server, Windows Vista and Windows XP. That means that due to the far reaching implementation of WMI, event logs, registry and file system support, there's not much that can't be managed relatively easily, or at least MUCH easier than VB script. At minimum PowerShell will help the administrator add value to all of the above mentioned.

But what about SBS, NT, Exchange 2000/2003, older/other........?

YES!

What do I mean by that? PowerShell supports the windows platform. Which even in the case of NT means, that while you may not be able to run it on an NT server, you are able to access it remotely, and virtually anything else which allows WMI. That may broaden your horizon dramatically. If you've been to one of my talks, then you may have heard me talk about learning how to PowerShell from inside the shell.

Having free data manipulation and export tools in the shell is part of the deal, allowing me to create a company wide report of current mailbox sizes in a few lines of code, AND compare that report against yesterdays snapshot.

In summary, if you're an Exchange administrator who needs to do more, has no money for tools, has tools that may not be doing the job, needs to do add-hoc reporting and management, there's a free shell out there that you may just want to look at. Since being an MVP is about trying to add value to our community, I would be amiss if I didn't try to make this point as hard as I could, since the value in both PowerShell 1.0 and 2.0 is incredible.

Oh, if you don't know yet - it's for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/download.mspx