John Savill Master Series Part 5: Become a PowerShell Master

Part 5: Become a PowerShell Master

To automate the management of large environments IT departments must move past graphical interfaces and instead look at scripting and automation capabilities. PowerShell has gone from strength to strength and should be the scripting and automation solution of choice for all IT administrators. This class will show you how to use PowerShell effectively in your organization and automate many of the tasks that are done manually today.

Session 1: Understanding the Goals and Features of PowerShell - 56 min
This session will look at the PowerShell structure, how to use PowerShell, the structure of commands, and passing objects from one PowerShell command to another PowerShell command to achieve very powerful sequences of actions with very little code. We’ll cover how to get help with PowerShell and provide hidden gems that will make your PowerShell life much easier. We’ll also cover the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) and provide best practices for creating PowerShell scripts.

Session 2: Using PowerShell to Automate Common tasks in the Datacenter and on the Desktop - 50 min
PowerShell is a mainstream part of the operating system and this session will look at using PowerShell in unexpected places, such as in policies for the desktop. Then we’ll look at using and triggering PowerShell to help manage your datacenter both for single machines and entire groups of servers using the advanced remote machine features of PowerShell. At the end of this session you will have the skills to create PowerShell commands and scripts that you can use on the entire datacenter to automate processes that have previously been highly manual and error prone. We’ll explore applications that leverage PowerShell, as well as ways to easily find the PowerShell used behind many graphical interfaces to quick-start your scripting needs.

Session 3: A Look at PowerShell v3 - 55 min
New to the Windows Management Framework version 3 and Windows Server 2012 is PowerShell version 3. In this session, we’ll cover PowerShell improvements, including workflows to manage long-running PowerShell activities, new robust sessions to handle network failures, improved scheduled PowerShell jobs and numerous improvements to the PowerShell language and help. We’ll also look at the top new cmdlets in Windows Server 2012.