Part 4. PowerShell platforms

Edited by Aleksandar Nikolić

If you’ve made it this far in the book chances are you’re a PowerShell fan, but by itself, PowerShell is irrelevant. Richard Siddaway once told Jeffrey Snover that PowerShell didn’t matter. After Jeffrey’s initial shock, Richard clarified that it’s what you can do with it that matters. This section is all about putting PowerShell to work.

PowerShell solutions for products and servers continue to arrive from Microsoft product teams and third-party vendors. PowerShell is a management engine and more of the stuff we deal with on a daily basis is being plugged into this engine.

There’s so much that could be written about using PowerShell to manage this platform or that application. In some cases entire books could be devoted to topics such as managing Exchange Server or SQL Server with PowerShell. Some of those books have been written and others are in the works.

The chapters in this section touch on a few areas that many IT pros are likely to have to deal with such as IIS, WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), and Active Directory. But even if you don’t need to manage these things, you should still take the time to look through the chapters. Often a technique or concept can be applied to other platforms.

The material in these chapters tends to rely on scripts and functions, which you can download from Manning. We encourage you to look at the code and test in a non-production environment, following along with each chapter.

When the time comes to develop your own PowerShell platform-specific solution and you need some help, we recommend using the forum at PowerShell.org.

Aleksandar Nikolić is a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell, a cofounder of PowerShellMagazine.com, and the community manager of PowerShell.com. He is an experienced presenter and speaker about Microsoft automation solutions, and has more than 17 years of experience as a system administrator. He is also available for one-on-one online PowerShell trainings. You can find him on Twitter: @alexandair.