SharePoint PowerShell

Update 10/25/2017: This article originally appeared on ITUnity.com but as that site has been decommissioned I’ve republished it here. With Office 365 now on SharePoint 2013, we finally have the long-awaited, and long-overdue support for using Windows PowerShell to manage SharePoint Online environments.

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I’d start blogging about some of my scripts that I have in my toolbox and I guess I’m a little behind in that but I guess better late than never.

I haven’t really done much blogging lately so I figured I’d try and get back into it by sharing some scripts from my collection. Over the years I’ve created tons and tons of little scripts here and there to help me solve one problem or another – whether it be some upgrade related thing or a content or build migration or just some random snippet to help me figure out what the heck is going on with my code or with SharePoint in general – I’ve got a ton of them just scattered all over the place.

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).

There was recently a twitter conversation between @cacallahan, @toddklindt, and @brianlala discussing provisioning Search on SharePoint Foundation and whether it was possible or not and somewhere during the conversation it was suggested that I might know how to do this (sorry guys for not responding immediately) – unfortunately I hadn’t actually done any work with SharePoint 2013 Foundation yet and so had not yet tried and thus didn’t know the answer (I knew there were issues and suspected a workaround was possible but I didn’t have a server built to test anything).

One of my clients recently had an issue where a particularly high profile user (CEO) had their title spelled incorrectly in Active Directory; unfortunately the error wasn’t noticed right away and now, despite changing the information in Active Directory, SharePoint was still showing the wrong title in the People Picker when granting the user rights to a Site Collection.

UPDATE 8/20/2011: I’ve reworked this script and included it as part of my SharePoint 2010 cmdlet downloads. See “Resetting SharePoint 2010 Themes – Part 2, the Reset-SPTheme cmdlet” for details.

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!

I’m working on an upgrade (database attach) for a client of mine and I ran into something somewhat unexpected with some User Profile properties – properties that used a choice field in 2007 (fields that allowed the administrator to define a list of values that the user could pick from) were migrated to Managed Term Store based fields when upgraded.