PowerShell's Popularity Is Growing in the SharePoint Community

When I first started covering PowerShell Plus in 2008, Idera was a major player in just the SQL Server market. So, at the time, I was a bit surprised when Idera targeted its PowerShell IDE toward those who work in the Windows world in addition to those who work in the SQL Server space. (See "SQL Server Provider Entering the PowerShell Tools Market".)

That actually turned out to be a brilliant move because PowerShell Plus's clientele now mainly consists of Windows server, Exchange Server, and Active Directory (AD) admins. SQL Server and SharePoint admins make up the smallest part of the customer base—but that will likely change soon. "The growth of PowerShell in the SharePoint community is higher right now than the growth in SQL Server community," said Rick Pleczko, president and CEO of Idera. "While SQL Server admins and DBAs can opt to use T-SQL, PowerShell is the only game in town in SharePoint 2010."

To help the SharePoint community not only learn and use PowerShell but also find and fix page performance problems, Idera is rolling out its new SharePoint productivity toolbox today. The toolbox bundles SharePoint page profiler 2.1 and PowerShell Plus 3.5, which comes with a library of ready-to-use SharePoint administration scripts.

SharePoint page profiler 2.1 can help identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in SharePoint pages. "If you have a page that's loading slowly or getting hung, you can run this product to find out what control is going awry. We've had a lot of demand for this product because it's really a debug test environment," said Pleczko.

Released just a few weeks ago, PowerShell Plus 3.5 is the newest version of Idera's PowerShell IDE. "The big thing in this release is we provide support for one of the coolest features in the latest version of PowerShell—and that is remoting," said Pleczko. "Shortly after the release of PowerShell 2.0, we saw that a lot of people were scratching their heads, trying to figure out how best to use its new remoting capabilities because there are so many options and switches you can configure. So, we wrote a white paper on it and said here's a good way to go about using it. That was one of the most popular pieces on our community site at PowerShell.com." And that's when Idera came up with the idea of adding Reusable Remoting Configurations to its IDE. You use PowerShell Plus's GUI to define a remote configuration (i.e., remote settings and target computers), give the configuration a name, and save it. Then when you need to run a script on those computers, you just select that remoting configuration and specify the script to run.

If you're interested in just PowerShell Plus 3.5 or just SharePoint page profiler 2.1, you can purchase them separately. For more information about the SharePoint productivity toolbox and the tools in it, go to Idera's website at www.idera.com.