HIMSS - MSHUG Presentation

I had the opportunity to evangelize about PowerShell at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) - Microsoft Health Users Group (MSHUG) last Saturday (4/4/2009). Other then my laptop freezing in the first ten minutes of the presentation, all went well. Given that I only had about 50 minutes, I decided to focus on "what" PowerShell can do versus "how". So I demonstrated the following:

• Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) report aggregation
• Process Tracking with WMI and PowerGadgets (read/write text files)
• Citrix License usage (WMI, SQL Server and PowerGadgets)
• Print Queue analysis (WMI, PowerGadgets)
• Exchange 2003 reporting (WMI)
• Active Directory Maintenance (using Quest’s ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory
  • Bulk User Creation
  • Group Creation
  • Discussed other AD related cmdlets
• VM Infrastructure (VI) Toolkit
  • Iterate over all virtual machines
  • Perusing the System Center events log with a custom GUI. A brief explanation of PrimalForms
  • Conditional Formatting in Excel with VM data

There were not nearly as many questions as I had anticipate (perhaps following lunch had a little to do with that).  Of the questions asked, a couple stood out.

• Why not continue to use VBScript and/or Perl
• Can scripts be compiled

Was able to reiterate the point that if you are moving forward with Microsoft, you really have no choice.  Throughout the session I tried to emphasize the power of objects and how utilizing them makes a systems admin job so much easier. As far as compiling is concerned, my response was “if compiling them is a requirement, then you should look at writing it in C# instead”.  Would be interested in seeing how others would have responded.

I want to thank the following people for sending PowerShell related materials for distribution at the session:

• Susan Roper (Quest Software)
• SoftwareFX sales staff
• Jeffery Hicks (Sapien Technologies)

Enjoy!