PowerShell

Throughout the years I’ve done numerous presentations related to using PowerShell with SharePoint and through them all I’ve often found myself wanting more time so that I could share more details.

Today I was working on a deployment for a client which entailed activating a custom SharePoint Feature on about 1000 Site Collections. This Feature did a fair number of things and on average it takes about 10-15 minutes to complete in their test environment (which is pretty slow compared to their production environment which I’ve not yet deployed to but I expect close to a 5 minute run time per Site Collection once I go to production with it).

In my earlier article where I pointed out some of my favorite features of Windows PowerShell V3 I noted one failing of the new Windows PowerShell ISE – the inability to copy text as HTML so that I can easily paste that HTML into my blog posts.

Now that SharePoint 2013 has been released to manufacturing and will be available for download soon I figured I’d go ahead and put together a quick post pointing out some of my favorite PowerShell V3 enhancements that you can use to improve your command-line usage of PowerShell as well as your automation scripts.

While preparing for my two PowerShell talks that I presented at the European SharePoint Best Practices Conference last week in London, I soon discovered that I had way too much content to present.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything useful due to all my writing efforts going to the book that I’ve been working on. However, I’ve recently wrapped up my last chapter for the book so I figured what better time to start focusing on my blog again.

My 10 year old daughter came home from school today with a simple math problem that she had to solve and she asked if there was an easier way to solve the problem.

I’ve been doing a lot of configuration driven PowerShell scripts lately and I had a bit of trouble figuring this bit out so I thought I’d write up a short post about it.