Category: PowerPack

PowerGUI Quick Tip: Create a PowerPack from start to finish in 10 minutes

Kirk Munro5 Comments

This Sunday at midnight PST marks the closing of our second annual PowerPack Challenge contest.  The rules of this contest are very simple: create a new PowerPack or modify one of your existing PowerPacks and submit it to the contest folder in the PowerPack Library for a chance to win some cool prizes.  Now you might be thinking: "Sunday, but that’s  just three days away…I don’t have time to put together an entry between now and Sunday. Besides, I want my weekend to myself!"  Well, you’re in luck my friend because you don’t need three days…you only need 10 minutes (well, 10 minutes after you watch a screencast showing what you can do with PowerShell, the PowerGUI Admin Console, and 10 minutes of your time).  That’s not even going to take up your whole lunch hour on Friday, and if you plan to go out for lunch you could make your PowerPack during your afternoon break instead!

Here’s all you need to do:

1.  Bookmark the PowerPack section of the wiki.  I published a big update to our wiki earlier this week and it should be able to answer a lot of questions you might have.  Don’t read the whole thing right now though, that might take too long and what you really want to do right now is explained in the next step.

2.  Watch this screencast (also shown below on YouTube) that shows how I created a cool Windows Server Roles and Features PowerPack from scratch earlier today and published it to the PowerPack Library in only 10 minutes.  The PowerPack even has dynamic nodes generated from 4 script nodes, which used to be quite a lot of work but thanks to the AdminConsole module they are much, much easier now.  In fact, if you pay close attention to the screencast, you’ll see that all of the functionality in the PowerPack itself is done with only 7 lines of PowerShell script plus one basic node and two basic actions — that’s pretty amazing.  The entire screencast is longer than 10 minutes because I needed to explain a few things before and after the demonstration, but the creation and publishing of the PowerPack itself is done in only 10 minutes during the screencast.

Now that I’ve armed you with the wiki documentation and the screencast demo, I’ll be looking forward to seeing your PowerPacks in the PowerPack Library after your lunch or afternoon break! 😉

Good luck with your PowerPacks!

Kirk out.

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Recover deleted Active Directory objects with the AD Recycle Bin PowerPack

Kirk Munro6 Comments

Last week Microsoft made the announcement that Windows Server 2008 R2 reached RTM.  Among the many cool new features provided with that release (Hello?  PowerShell v2?  Need I say more?), Microsoft has now added a recycle bin feature to Active Directory.  The management interface provided by Microsoft for this feature is the command line, or more specifically, PowerShell.  That’s great if you’re like me and you love to manage your infrastructure using PowerShell, but what if you prefer a GUI?  Fortunately there is a solution for you too.

As Jackson Shaw suggested on his blog about a week ago, PowerGUI provides an admin console that allows you to create your own management UI that is layered on top of PowerShell.  This admin console can be extended with PowerPacks, which are essentially add-ins that provide additional user interface elements in PowerGUI that invoke PowerShell script when clicked.  All you need to do is add the user interface elements you want and then provide the scripts to power those elements, managing the Active Directory Recycle Bin objects or anything else you need to manage.  Or alternatively you can check to see if someone on the PowerGUI Community like myself has already created a PowerPack with the functionality you are looking for.

In the case of the Active Directory Recycle Bin, you’re in luck.  I just finished creating the first release of a new PowerPack that is designed to allow you to manage any objects in your recycle bin.  You can find the Active Directory Recycle Bin PowerPack by following the hyperlink here or by going directly to http://www.powergui.org and browsing into the Active Directory subcategory in the PowerPack Library.  This PowerPack includes the following features:

  • View the contents of the recycle bin, including hierarchies
  • Restore individual items in the recycle bin (recursively or not) to their original location
  • Restore individual items in the recycle bin (recursively or not) to a specified location
  • Permanently delete objects in the recycle bin (recursively or not)
  • Empty the contents of the recycle bin
  • Modify the number of days that the recycle bin is configured to retain objects and the number of days that objects are to be kept in a tombstone state before permanent deletion

If you would like to see a demo of the Active Directory Recycle Bin PowerPack, watch this screencast:

If you prefer watching a high resolution version of the screencast, you can watch it in flash format here or on YouTube directly in HD format here.

This is the initial release of this PowerPack and it contains a good amount of new functionality.  If you are experimenting with the Active Directory Recycle Bin feature, please take a look at this PowerPack and provide any feedback you have so that we can continue to provide improvements that are valuable to you and others in future releases.

Thanks for listening!

Kirk out.

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Create your own org chart from AD with PowerGUI!

Kirk Munro18 Comments

Another week has gone by and I have another brand new PowerPack ready for download.  This time around it’s the Org Chart PowerPack.  This is a PowerPack that I put together based on a Get-OrgChart function I wrote to analyze org chart data at work.  It lets you do some really cool things such as:

  1. Dynamically create an org chart from users in Active Directory using title, department, office, address, and other properties.
  2. Generate a Visio Org Chart from PowerGUI for the any branch of an organization.
  3. Create statistical reports for the employees in your organization to see breakdowns of employees by office, department, management, etc.
  4. Dynamically generate Office Directory reports in HTML when using it in conjunction with the Advanced Reporting PowerPack.

Note: The Org Chart PowerPack uses the Quest AD cmdlets to retrieve information from AD so you will need to install those first before you can use the PowerPack.

If you would like to see how this PowerPack can be of benefit to you, check out this screencast:

This screencast was recorded in HD format so you can click on the HD button once you start watching it to enable high definition video.  Alternatively, if you would prefer to watch a high resolution flash version with a table of contents you can watch the screencast here.  I decided to try widescreen format this time since that is my format preference
let me know if this is a problem for you.

This is the first release of this PowerPack and I’m anxious to hear what you think so please give it a look and share your feedback so that I can improve it with another update in the future.

Thanks for listening!

Kirk out.

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Just Released: Advanced Reporting PowerPack

Kirk Munro3 Comments

I just published a brand new PowerPack to the PowerPack Library called the Advanced Reporting PowerPack.  If you’ve been keeping your eyes on the Virtualization EcoShell project as well as PowerGUI, you may have already come across this PowerPack because I released it there first.

The Advanced Reporting PowerPack allows you to generate HTML reports with collapsible nested groups for any set of data in PowerGUI.  Think VMs, Snapshots, AD Users or Groups
you name it.  If you can get the data into a grid in PowerGUI, you can generate a nice HTML report using this PowerPack.  The only UI element this PowerPack adds to PowerGUI is a common action called “Create report
”.  This action does all of the heavy lifting to generate a cool HTML report for the items you have selected.

Want to see what how to get started using this PowerPack?  Watch this screencast:

If you would prefer to watch a higher resolution version, you can watch the screencast in flash format here.

This is only the first release of advanced reporting functionality in PowerGUI and already it’s really powerful.  Still, there is room for improvement so if you have any feedback, please share it with me in my comments or on the PowerGUI Forums so that I can consider it for the next release!

Thanks and enjoy!

Kirk out.

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Virtualization EcoShell and the VMware Infrastructure PowerPack

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

Wow, have I been busy.  In case you hadn’t noticed from my blog posts late last year and early this year, I’ve been working very hard at putting together multiple back-to-back updates for the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack for the past several months.  This has involved working long hours with many thousands of lines of PowerShell script and figuring out how to do some really cool things with both PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI (formerly known as the VI Toolkit).  The end result is always fulfulling, and I’m usually pretty good at setting up the really cool functionality so that I can leverage it in any PowerPack so all my hard work pays off in the long run.

A few weeks ago I finished off yet another update with some really cool new features, however this update isn’t available for the PowerGUI admin console just yet.  That update is coming shortly after we release the next version of PowerGUI, which has some functionality that it is dependent on.  If you can’t wait until then though, you can take a look at the new functionality now as part of the first public beta release of the Virtualization EcoShell that came out on April 15th.

What is the Virtualization EcoShell?  The Virtualization EcoShell is a project started by Scott Herold that was designed to provide an administrative experience that is tailored for virtualization administrators.  It is powered by PowerGUI and comes with a script editor and an admin console just like PowerGUI.  The out of the box experience is different though because it doesn’t come with PowerPacks for Exchange and Active Directory.  Instead it includes functionality that virtualization administrators care most about.  At the moment this is simply the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack, but over time this will grow to include other virtualization-related administrative functionality (think: additional VMware features, functionality to work with virtualization platforms from other vendors, and capabilities to extend into important technologies surrounding virtualization such as storage).

If you want a preview of the next generation of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack a little early as well as a look at a new virtualization administration platform, all you have to do is pop over to the Virtualization EcoShell site and download it.  You can install and use it side-by-side with PowerGUI, so you won’t need any secondary systems or a VM to run it on either.  Once you’ve taken a look, let us know what you think or what you would like to see next on the forums!  Your feedback directly influences the features we add, and we’re listening!

Kirk out.

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