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Hello fellow PowerShell enthusiasts. I have been missing for a few months with a new child that has occupied most of my extra time! I look forward to get back in the blogging gear soon. I just wanted to send out a note that we are hosting our first kick off meeting for the Boston PowerShell User Group at the Microsoft MTC in Kendall Square Cambridge, MA. Here are the two topics that will be delivered via Matt Nelson and Will Schroeder.
There is a lot of documentation out there for interacting with Microsoft Office including Outlook, Excel, Word, etc with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). A lot of time you may only be able to find VBA examples. VBA’s require template files to be sent to the desktop and are a real hassle when trying to automate across multiple machines. There are not many A to B examples of translating VBA to PowerShell so I took a problem I had solved in the past and presented the before and after.
If you are not on Office 365 or have a tenant set up with Microsoft yet, now is the time to reserve your tenant name! With utilizing Office 365, a lot of administration is only available from a PowerShell session. There is a mix of outdated information on what you actually need to install and execute in order to connect to all of the Office 365 services. As a result, I accumulated and wrote up the current download requirements and commands to connect and administer every Office 365 service from one PowerShell session.
Creating windows shortcuts are usually done through the New Shortcut Wizard, MSI files, Group Policy Objects, or even a simple file copy. Shortcut files are .lnk files that Microsoft Windows uses for shortcuts to local files while .url is used for destinations such as web sites. As we all are aware, the .lnk filename extension is hidden in Windows Explorer even when “Hide extensions for known file types” is unchecked in File Type options.
I am back this week with a quick how-to article on delivering, installing, or launching version controlled files. In the past I ran into problems when having administrators launch my PowerShell tools from a network share. The performance was slow when launching it across the WAN, and the file would often be locked when I tried to replace it with a newer version. I came up with a solution to the problem by using none other than PowerShell.
Its a new year with new goals and I hope to provide even more assistance and value to the PowerShell community in 2016. I have created a new Boston based PowerShell user group and will be working hard on creating sessions as frequently and regularly as possible. If you are in the greater Boston or New England area please join the user group. If we have any Microsoft employees or PowerShell MVPs visiting the Boston area in the future, we would love to have you deliver a session.
Hey everyone, hope you had a great 2015 and I am back with I hope to be weekly updates for everyone at PowerShell.org. I wrote up a quick article on how to retrieve the last reboot time or the current up time for any local or remote computer. I also include a function that can be used to query remote computers as well. There may be a situation where you want to determine whether you take action depending on the last reboot time, or you may simply want it to be displayed for debugging or logging purposes.
After a two week hiatus I am back this week with a quick write up on how to automate the updating of PowerShell help. Update-Help should be one of the first things typed in PowerShell on a new workstation build. I jump into the topic and demonstrate how to automate the updating of the help files from the Internet or from a local network share. You can view the full article over at PowerShellBlogger.
I addressed a reader requested script for my article this week. PowerShell gives you the ability to add computers to Active Directory right from the command line with the built in PowerShell commandlets. This was introduced with PowerShell version 3 and can be used to automate imaging processes or to prompt an agent for the desired computer name and organizational unit. This is useful since a lot of organizations will use specific OUs for computers according to location or department.
I am back this week with some more Exchange and Unified Communications goodness. This is another request I see a lot, someone want’s to know where an e-mail address is assigned. This opens up the possibilities of user mailboxes, shared mailboxes, distribution lists, public folders, conference rooms, contacts or resources. I have also seen duplicate e-mail addresses being assigned outside of Exchange causing delivery failures. I take a look at how you can quickly find any e-mail address in your environment along with partial searches of e-mail addresses.