As most people know by now, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 was released to the public today. There’s already been a lot of hype over some of the new capabilities such as the site recycle bin and some folks have documented/demonstrated some of the new PowerShell cmdlets that are available to manage this new feature; but what about all the other new and changed PowerShell cmdlets – there’s a bunch! So, let’s take a look at what is new, and what has changed.
We’ll start with the new stuff – here’s a quick bulleted list of all the new cmdlets:
Add-SPProfileLeaderGet-SPProfileLeaderRemove-SPProfileLeaderRemove-SPProfileSyncConnectionAdd-SPProfileSyncConnectionDisable-SPHealthAnalysisRuleEnable-SPHealthAnalysisRuleGet-SPHealthAnalysisRuleGet-SPDeletedSiteRemove-SPDeletedSiteRestore-SPDeletedSiteMove-SPSocialComments
I haven’t had a chance to try any of these out but I think there’s some cool new functionality here beyond just the site recycle bin. There’s absolutely no documentation for any of these but some of them are fairly straightforward based on the names. For instance, the Add-SPProfileSyncConnectioncmdlet (and equivalent Remove cmdlet) are obviously for managing the synchronization connections for UPS. This was a big whole in RTM when it came to doing an end-to-end scripted installation as there was no practical way to add a synchronization connection using PowerShell. The health analysis rule cmdlets are also pretty obvious and, again, this goes a long way towards enabling administrators to script a deployment and enable or disable rules consistently across Farms.
I think the Move-SPSocialCommentsalso has a lot of potential; if it does what I’m guessing it does then this could potentially solve the issue where comments and tags are stored with the absolute URL of the item that has been tagged/commented on – I’m *guessing* that running this command will effectively retarget those items, which is great in situations in which you’ve moved a list or site.
As for the *-SPProfileLeadercmdlets – I have no idea what those guys do so I’ll have to revisit them when I learn more. (The *-SPDeletedSite cmdlets have already been covered quite a bit by others so I’ll forgo any further discussion here).
Alright, so that’s the new stuff – what about the stuff that’s changed? Here’s a quick list with the changes:
Mount-SPContentDatabase- New Switch Parameter:
ChangeSyncKnowledge(I’ve no idea what this does – it’s not yet documented)
- New Switch Parameter:
New-SPContentDatabase- New Switch Parameter:
ChangeSyncKnowledge(again, not yet documented)
- New Switch Parameter:
Move-SPSite- New Parameter:
RbsProviderMapping <Hashtable>- From TechNet: “Used to move an RBS-enabled site collection from one RBS-enabled content database to another RBS-enabled content database without moving the underlying BLOB content. If the content database has more than one RBS provider associated with it, you must specify all providers. The same providers must be enabled on the target content database and the source content database.”
- New Parameter:
New-SPPerformancePointServiceApplication- New Parameter:
AnalyticResultCacheMinimumHitCount <Int32>(not yet documented but I think it’s fairly obvious what it does) - New Parameters:
DatabaseServer,DatabaseName,DatabaseFailoverServer,DatabaseSQLAuthenticationCredential <PSCredential>- Can I get a hurray for this! This was the only Service Application that didn’t allow us to set the database information when we created it so we were left with this nasty GUID in the name. Hurray! We can finally get rid of the last database GUID! Woohoo!
- New Parameter:
Set-SPPerformancePointServiceApplication- New Parameter:
AnalyticResultCacheMinimumHitCount <Int32>(not yet documented but I think it’s fairly obvious what it does) - New Parameters:
DatabaseServer,DatabaseName,DatabaseFailoverServer,DatabaseSQLAuthenticationCredential <PSCredential>,DatabaseUseWindowsAuthentication
- New Parameter:
Remove-SPWeb- New Switch Parameter:
Recycle- That’s right, you can in fact cause an
SPWebto go to the new recycle bin by simply providing this switch parameter.
- That’s right, you can in fact cause an
- New Switch Parameter:
Update-SPProfilePhotoStore(I think this one is a bit of mess and may need a CU or two but I could just be reading the code wrong – it is kind of late right now)- Update 6/29/2011: From Spence Harbar: “Update-SPProfilePhotoStore change is to address common bug/issue with resize and is for upgrade scenarios”`
- New Switch Parameter:
CreateThumbnailsForImportedPhotos- I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to do as thumbnails were created previously and will be created without this; however, I should note that they coded this wrong so both of the following syntaxes have the same affect as they are simply checking that the
bool?type has a value and not what the value is:-CreateThumbnailsForImportedPhotos $true-CreateThumbnailsForImportedPhotos $false
- I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to do as thumbnails were created previously and will be created without this; however, I should note that they coded this wrong so both of the following syntaxes have the same affect as they are simply checking that the
- New Switch Parameter:
NoDelete- I’m not 100% on this but I believe that the original behavior of this cmdlet was to copy the image and not actually move it (despite the name); they appear to have changed the behavior to delete the original images after the copy but you can preserve the original behavior by simply adding this switch parameter. However, this is *only* true when the
CreateThumbnailsForImportedPhotosparameter is provided (in my opinion this is a bug – it should be irrelevant if that parameter is provided).
- I’m not 100% on this but I believe that the original behavior of this cmdlet was to copy the image and not actually move it (despite the name); they appear to have changed the behavior to delete the original images after the copy but you can preserve the original behavior by simply adding this switch parameter. However, this is *only* true when the
Well, that’s all I’ve been able to discover with the core SharePoint Server 2010 cmdlets – I may update this post to account for the Office Web Applications but I don’t currently have that installed on the server in which I just installed SP1 so it may take me a bit to do that analysis. At some point I may write something up to inspect the public classes and their members and do a similar post for the developers out there who want to know what API changes have occurred so keep an eye out for that.
So I think it’s pretty cool that we’ve got some improvements in the PowerShell cmdlets, especially in some of those that have frustrated me when it comes to automated deployments; the real frustrating thing, however, is that some of my just released book content is already out of date! Ugh! Maybe there’ll be a second edition 
Happy PowerShelling!
-Gary