Poshoholic

Last week, the Quest vWorkspace guys showed their prowess once again when they released the first version of the vWorkspace PowerPack for PowerGUI® Pro and PowerGUI®.  I love this PowerPack because it really demonstrates how PowerGUI is so complementary to PowerShell.  To see what I mean, take a look at the following screenshot:

This screenshot shows two major improvements to the vWorkspace management experience by demonstrating how you can use the vWorkspace PowerPack to perform management tasks across all farms, and by demonstrating how you can use the vWorkspace PowerPack to perform management tasks across all locations in a single farm or across all locations in all farms.  In the native vWorkspace management user interface, you can only work with one farm at a time, and you can only work with one location at a time.

Scaling management tasks out in a product like this can take a long time when you need to build the capabilities into a native management user interface, and these days in many cases PowerShell is provided as the vehicle to satisfy larger scale automation and management needs.  PowerShell is great and it definitely fits the bill for these medium to large enterprise needs, however it does not provide a user interface to facilitate those management scenarios.  This is where the administrative console in PowerGUI Pro and PowerGUI really shines, because it allows you to build out rich PowerPacks with enterprise-ready solutions with very low cost and effort.

I spoke directly with Adam Driscoll (author of PowerGUI VSX, member of the vWorkspace team, and one of two developers who created the vWorkspace PowerPack) about this, and it took them less than one week to put this PowerPack together.  That’s less than one week for two developers to create a rich, functional management user interface that not only provides many of the management capabilities that come with the vWorkspace management console, but that also adds additional enterprise capabilities that the vWorkspace management console does not provide natively.  Aside from the multi-farm management and multi-location management features I mentioned earlier, it also allows administrators to upgrade the vWorkspace VM tools on the VMs you select, and it simplifies how administrators search for provisioning objects like templates, sysprep customizations, parent VHDs, and so on.  And by building these capabilities into a PowerPack, vWorkspace administrators can perform custom filtering and sorting of the data in the grid, generate rich HTML reports for that data, export the data to an external file for use in other programs, and view the PowerShell scripts that are doing all of the work, all because those features come with the PowerGUI administrative console automatically.  That’s an amazing feat for one weeks worth of effort!

The really sweet part of all of this is that it gets even better very soon.  If you’ve been following my blog recently you’ve seen that we have released two betas of PowerGUI Pro 3.0 in the last little while which comes with many great features worth highlighting, however for now I only want to mention one: MobileShell.  In PowerGUI Pro 3.0, you can provide administrators with a custom mobile management solution, defined using PowerPacks and tailored for their needs using role-based access control (RBAC).  That means that once we release PowerGUI Pro 3.0 (which should happen very soon), the vWorkspace guys will be able to publish an update to their PowerPack that enables mobile management support so that vWorkspace administrators can have a mobile management solution for very little cost!  All they will need once the vWorkspace PowerPack is updated to support this mobile management scenario is a license of PowerGUI Pro 3.0 for each administrator who wants to manage their vWorkspace environment from their webkit-enabled mobile device.  Considering that it also allows those administrators to create executable files from PowerShell scripts, work with integrated version control in a best-in-class script editor, manage systems remotely using easy PowerShell remoting capabilities, find functions they are working with using go to definition support for functions, and more, the PowerGUI Pro price of $199/user is a pretty good value.

If you are at all interested in VDI, you should give vWorkspace a look because it’s an awesome solution that keeps getting better all the time.  If you use vWorkspace already I encourage you to take a look at the PowerShell capabilities that this team is providing, particularly in the PowerPack, because a ton of additional value is being provided here that is worth checking out.  You can find the installation instructions for the PowerPack on the vWorkspace PowerPack page on PowerGUI.org.

That’s it for this post.  If you have any questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reply in the comments below.

Thanks!

Kirk out.

Hot on the heels of our first beta cycle for PowerGUI Pro 3.0, today we released beta 2 of PowerGUI Pro 3.0 to the web.  This release includes a lot of fixes and improvements based on the feedback we’ve received from you during our first beta cycle, so thank you for that feedback!

Here are some details about the improvements that have been made in the 2nd beta of PowerGUI Pro 3.0:

Improved snippets hierarchy

Several users indicated that some of our snippets were hard to find.  To resolve this issue, I’ve reorganized our snippets into an improved snippets hierarchy that should make it easier for you to find the snippets you are looking for and learn more about what you can do with PowerShell from our snippet collection.  A special thanks goes out to Denniver Reining, author of the very popular Snippet Manager Add-on.  Denniver was able to provide very useful feedback as I was going through the improvements in this release, which was very helpful.  To browse the new snippet hierarchy, simply press Ctrl+I while editing a document in the Script Editor.  Here’s a screenshot showing the top level representation of the new snippets hierarchy:

Installer option to open Script Editor

Since the first release of PowerGUI we have provided an option at the end of the installation to open the PowerGUI Admin Console.  This is useful, but myself and many of our users have requested if we could open the Script Editor as well.  With this beta 2 release, you can now open the Script Editor or the Admin Console at the end of the installation.

PowerPack Shared Scripts are now loaded from regular nodes and actions

When you author a PowerPack, you can create a function library inside a shared script for the PowerPack.  This is useful, however until now shared scripts would only load when you clicked on a script node or script action.  This has now been changed so that shared scripts are now loaded from regular nodes and actions, allowing you to keep all of your PowerPack functions in one location and then create regular nodes and actions using those functions.

Performance improvements, usability improvements and lots of bug fixes

In addition to these items, we have improved the performance in some scenarios in MobileShell and in the Script Editor, we have addressed some usability improvements in the Script Editor, the Admin Console and MobileShell, and we have fixed a lot of bugs as well (it is a beta cycle after all, and what good would a beta cycle be if it didn’t include bug fixes?).

Don’t forget all of the new features that were in the first beta!

Besides these changes, if you’re just finding out about the beta of PowerGUI Pro 3.0, make sure you read my other blog post that highlights all of the new features like compiling scripts into executables, or the new MobileShell user interface that allows you to use PowerPacks from your smartphone or tablet – those features and many more were included in the first beta of this release.  If you want to try the awesome new MobileShell capabilities, this blog post will help you get that set up in your test lab: Configuring RBAC for MobileShell in PowerGUI Pro 3.0.

Great, so where can I get beta 2?

Beta 2 is available for download now, in the same location where we posted the first beta.  You can find it on the PowerGUI Pro 3.0 beta page.  When you are installing this beta, you will need to provide a license key.  License keys for the beta are included in the zip file for the beta, right beside the msi and exe installers for the PowerGUI Pro 3.0 components – look for the asc file in the Components folder.

Please share your feedback!

We will be running the second beta for a short period while we work on finishing up this release.  Your feedback is very important during this beta cycle, so please give the beta release a try and share your feedback by posting messages on the PowerGUI forums.  The sooner we get your feedback, the sooner we can respond to it.  I’m really looking forward to hearing what you like, what you don’t like, and what else you would like to see in this and future releases, so please share your thoughts with us.

Enjoy!

Kirk out.