Tag: Quest AD Cmdlets

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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PowerShell Quick Tip: Setting AD object attributes with ScriptBlock parameters

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

In PowerShell you can pass pipeline data to parameters that are not configured to accept pipeline input using ScriptBlock parameters.  This has been discussed before and it is well worth your time to make yourself familiar with that capability of PowerShell because it allows you to create true one-liners in places where you might think you cannot.  Basically it boils down to this: you can pass a script block into parameters in a cmdlet that is not of type script block and within the script block you provide the $_ variable will contain the object that was just passed down the pipeline.  The script block will be evaluated first, and then the result will be passed into the cmdlet parameter.

Still, even with that knowledge in hand people often trip over the ScriptBlock parameter syntax when using a parameter that takes a hash table (aka an associative array) as input.  The most common example I can think of where this is encountered is in the Quest AD cmdlets.

Many of the Quest AD cmdlets have a parameter called ObjectAttributes.  This parameter serves two purposes: in Get cmdlets it is used to define the values you want to filter on; in Set and New cmdlets it is used to define the values you want to assign to specific attributes.  Not consistent, I know, but that’s a whole other discussion.  In both cases the ObjectAttributes parameter is a hash table and to use it you simply need to define a hash table that matches attribute names with values.  Here’s an example showing how users trip over the syntax without realizing it:

Get-QADComputer Comp1 `
    | Set-QADObject -ObjectAttributes ` 
        @{userAccountControl=$_.userAccountControl -bxor 2}

This one liner was designed to enable or disable a computer object in AD.  It will run without raising an error, and it will even enable or disable the computer object, but it will not work like you might expect.  After running this command the userAccountControl attribute (which contains many flags, not just a flag for enabled/disabled state) will not be properly configured.  Why?  It looks like it is properly using a ScriptBlock parameter, but it is not so the $_.userAccountControl value will either evaluate to 0 if the $_ variable is null or if it does not have a userAccountControl property, or it will contain the userAccountControl value from whatever object the $_ variable contained before you called Get-QADComputer in the first stage of this pipeline.  Nothing in this command instructs PowerShell to treat the ObjectAttributes parameter as a ScriptBlock parameter.  So what’s missing?

The most important thing to remember about ScriptBlock parameters is that they always must be surrounded by script block enclosures (“{“ and “}”).  Otherwise they are not script blocks.  In our example above it looks like the parameter is surrounded by the proper enclosures, but that’s not true.  It’s surrounded by hash table enclosures (“@{“ and “}”), and this is what trips people up when working with this syntax.  To make this be properly treated as a ScriptBlock parameter, we need to surround the hash table with curly braces, like this:

Get-QADComputer Comp1 `
    | Set-QADObject -ObjectAttributes ` 
        {@{userAccountControl=$_.userAccountControl -bxor 2}}

That makes PowerShell recognize that we have a ScriptBlock parameter and the $_ variable within it properly evaluates to the object that just came down the pipeline.  No ForEach-Object or temporary variables required.  It seems simple enough when explaining it but you’d be surprised how many people get tripped up on this syntax.

If you want to see some forum discussions where this has been an issue for others, you can go here or here.

Kirk out.

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Create custom nodes easily with the Active Directory PowerPack and PowerGUI

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

Here’s a great question that someone just posted today on the PowerGUI forums:

I have the latest verions of the Quest AD cmdlets, PowerGUI and the Active Directory PowerPack.  Can I use PowerGUI to search for old computer accounts?  For example: computer accounts that haven’t had their machine account password reset for over three months?

The timing of this question is perfect because the update of the Active Directory PowerPack that I posted two weeks ago allows you to do this without having to write any scripts yourself.  For those of you who want to try this but don’t have the most recent versions of PowerGUI, the Quest AD cmdlets and the Active Directory PowerPack installed, follow those links and download and install those before continuing.  Installation instructions are on the appropriate web pages where necessary.

Once you all of the necessary software installed, here’s what you need to do.

Step 1: Add the attributes you need to the list of attributes retrieved from Active Directory.

There are In the PowerGUI Admin Console, expand the “Active Directory” node and click on “Configuration”.  This will show you the current domain that PowerGUI will gather data from.  You can change this if you like, however you don’t need to unless you want to use alternate credentials or connect to another domain.  With the configuration showing in the grid, click on the “Manage default attributes” link.  That will present you with a view something like this:

image

This shows you the current list of attributes that are retrieved for each individual Active Directory object.  This will be initially configured with the default attributes as defined by the Quest AD cmdlets plus a few attributes that are required for the Active Directory PowerPack.  You can add whatever attributes you want to gather here for any of the object types.  To help solve our immediate problem and be able to get a list of computer accounts that have not had their machine account password reset for over three months, we need to add the pwdLastSet attribute for computer objects.  To do this, simply click on the “Add attribute…” action, provide the name of the pwdLastSet attribute in the “Attribute name” field and set the “Retrieve attribute for computer objects” value to True.  When you click on OK, that attribute configuration will be saved and any computer objects retrieved using the Quest AD cmdlets will have that attribute retrieved with them.

Step 2: Retrieve the objects you want from Active Directory and optionally show the attributes you want to filter on.

Once you have configured PowerGUI so that it will retrieve the pwdLastSet attribute for computer objects, you need to get your computers.  You can do this by simply clicking on the “Computers” child node under the “Active Directory” node.  This will present you with a list of computer accounts, showing their Name, Type and DN by default.

With the list of computer objects showing, you can optionally add the pwdLastSet attribute to the view by right-clicking in the column headers and selecting “More…” from the menu that appears.  With the list of all attributes that can be added showing, scroll down until you find the pwdLastSet attribute and check the checkbox beside it.  Then click on OK to save that change and your pwdLastSet attribute will be retrieved with your computer objects from the Computers node.

Step 3: Create a client-side filter to filter out the objects you don’t care about.

With the list of all of your computer objects showing, you can create a filter to reduce the number of objects to those that you need to see.  To do this, click on the Filters button above the column headers.  This will make the filter panel visible.

image

You can use this panel to filter any collection based on the properties of the objects in that collection.  For our particular problem, we want to see computer objects whose password has not been changed in the last 3 months.  We can get that by selecting “pwdLastSet” in the “Property” field, “Less or equal” in the “Operator” field, and selecting the calendar date three months ago in the “Value” field using the calendar control.  Once that is set, click on the “Apply” button to apply the filter and your list of computer objects will be filtered to only show those whose machine passwords haven’t changed in the last 3 months.

Step 4: Make the newly filtered data set available in its own node.

Now that you have the data you’re looking after, your “Computers” node is now configured to always show you the filtered list because PowerGUI remembers the filters you apply to nodes.  You might not like this configuration, preferring to have a separate node to view the data that you want.  Fortunately, PowerGUI lets you do create that easily too, and you still don’t have to do any scripting.  To create a separate node that lets you get the same data set, simply click on the “Save As…” button in the filter panel.  This will allow you to save the script from the Computers node with the filter you have created automatically applied as a client-side filter for that script.  Simply give the new script node a name (something intuitive like “Computers with old passwords” will do), and click on OK to save the new child node.  Then you can click on the “Clear All” button in the filter panel for your “Computers” node because that filter will no longer be needed.  Now click on your new node and you’ll get the list of computers you are after, and it will look something like the screenshot below.

image

Step 5: Make your work reusable at any time by taking it one step further.

At this point you have successfully created a new node that gets specifically the data you were looking for and you didn’t have to do any scripting to get it, which is great!  You can make it a little better still though.  For our specific problem that we’re trying to solve, we created a new node that reports any computer object with a machine account password that hasn’t been changed within 3 months from today.  But tomorrow that will be come 3 months and 1 day.  The next day that will become 3 months and 2 days.  What if you want to customize the node so that it reports computers whose machine accounts have not had their passwords changed in the last 3 months, no matter what day you click on it?  For that to work you will have to do a minor script modification.

Right-click on your new “Computers with old passwords” node and select properties.  This will show you the script used to retrieve your computers and filter the list.  At the very end of that script, you will see something like the following:

func_Computers | Where-Object {
    $_.'pwdlastset' -le [System.DateTime]"2009-02-08"
}

The Where-Object cmdlet contains the filter that is excluding any computers whose pwdLastSet attribute is greater than 3 months from the day we did this (for me that that’s February 8, 2009 since I created the node on May 8, 2009).  To change that filter so that it always works using a date 3 months earlier than now, you simply need to replace [System.DateTime]”2009-02-08” with (Get-Date).AddMonths(-3).  That changes the end of our script to this:

func_Computers | Where-Object {
    $_.'pwdlastset' -le (Get-Date).AddMonths(-3)
}

That’s it!  A simple replacement of the filter condition and you’re off and running with a brand new node designed to meet your specific needs with PowerGUI, the Quest AD cmdlets and the Active Directory PowerPack!

In a future article I’ll show you just how simple it is for you to take a collection of extensions to PowerPacks that you have created like this and package them up in a PowerPack so that you can share them with other users in the Community as well!

Enjoy!

Kirk out.

 

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The Active Directory PowerPack, the Quest AD cmdlets, and what can happen when you change public object interfaces or cmdlet parameter attributes in PowerShell

Kirk Munro6 Comments

This is about what can happen when things go wrong and what not to do so that things don’t go wrong.

In case you didn’t know, I work at Quest Software on the PowerGUI Team.  My position is rather unique because I work exclusively with Windows PowerShell, and I don’t think there are too many jobs out there that offer that experience.  The main focus of my job is to create and extend PowerPacks, which are collections of PowerShell scripts that are packaged together to define an extension to the customizable PowerGUI Admin Console.  The scripts in the PowerPacks I create range anywhere from the extremely simple (one cmdlet or function call) to the very complicated (a script that calls into one or more functions that span many thousands of lines of PowerShell script).

Among others, one of the PowerPacks that I manage is the Active Directory PowerPack.  The Active Directory PowerPack provides a management interface to Active Directory, and it uses the Quest AD cmdlets in its PowerShell scripts to do the actual management of Active Directory.  For quite a few reasons1,  I need to explicitly indicate which connection should be used when you use that PowerPack to do something with Active Directory, regardless of what it is you are doing.  This means I am absolutely dependent on being able to determine what connection should be used in any script that is included in the PowerPack.  For scripts that are used at the beginning of a pipeline I look for the appropriate connection information that is stored globally.  For other scripts that are used later in a pipeline with Quest AD cmdlets I look at the Connection property that is attached to the objects coming down the pipeline.  This model has worked very well until recently when something unexpected happened.

Almost two weeks ago, just after version 1.2 of the Quest AD cmdlets was released, it came to my attention that the Connection property that I am so dependent on was not included on objects in that release.  For those of you who are not developers, this type of change (changing a public interface in an SDK) is very bad news.  It is called a breaking change, and the name is very fitting – the Active Directory PowerPack started breaking all over the place for users who upgraded their Quest AD cmdlets to version 1.2!

Amid a flurry of email discussions between myself and the Quest AD cmdlets team I spent the next week and a bit putting together an update to the Active Directory PowerPack so that it would work despite these changes, basically putting the Connection property there myself if it isn’t there.  At the same time, the Quest AD cmdlets team quickly started work on a 1.2.1 patch release to put the Connection property back in so that scripts outside of PowerGUI that use that property wouldn’t be affected either.  The patch for the Quest AD cmdlets is not available yet, but the updated Active Directory PowerPack, and the updated Network PowerPack which also used the Quest AD cmdlets a fair amount and was therefore susceptible to this change, are now posted in the PowerPack library and available for download.  If you use these PowerPacks, I strongly recommend you download and import the most recent releases of each of these PowerPacks.  Their document page in the PowerPack library contains all of the information you need to upgrade your PowerPacks and get started using the new versions.

Now that I have finished dealing with the impact of a breaking change like this one and the unpleasant work that ensues,  I thought it would be worthwhile to share with others what exactly consititutes a breaking change in a PowerShell cmdlet or advanced function.  The following is a list of 13 rules that you should adhere to when updating your cmdlets or advanced functions if you want to avoid introducing breaking changes:

  1. Do not remove any published parameters that are included in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.
  2. Do not rename any published parameters that are included in your published cmdlets or advanced functions unless you add an alias to the parameter that is the old parameter name.
  3. Do not reduce or remove pipeline support for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions that support pipeline input.
  4. Do not remove support for $null input for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions that support $null input.
  5. Do not modify the default value for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions unless that modification will not change how the command functions in existing scripts.
  6. Do not add a required flag to any parameter in published parameter sets in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.
  7. Do not modify the position of any published parameters in published parameter sets in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.
  8. Do not replace the associated object type with an incompatible type for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.
  9. Do not remove wildcard support for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions that have wildcard support.
  10. Do not remove support for building the value from the remaining arguments in any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions that support building the value in this manner.
  11. Do not remove any of your published parameters from published parameter sets in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.
  12. Do not increase validation restrictions for any of your published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions that have validation restrictions.
  13. Do not modify or remove aliases for any published parameters in your published cmdlets or advanced functions.

Additionally you need to pay attention to the objects that are returned by your cmdlets or advanced functions so that you don’t introduce breaking changes on those either.  The following rules should be adhered to in order to avoid breaking changes on objects returned by your cmdlets or advanced functions:

  1. Do not remove a public property or method.
  2. Do not replace the types associated with a public property or method with incompatible types.
  3. Do not modify the order of the parameters in a public method.
  4. Do not add required parameters in a public method.

Not following these rules means risking breaking production scripts, risking making your customers unhappy, and many other potential undesirable consequences.  Please, if you are seriously trying to add value to the PowerShell ecosystem by extending it with additional commands, pay attention to these rules and don’t introduce breaking changes when you update them!

Thanks for listening!

Kirk out.

1 Reasons why the connection must be explicitly indicated in the Active Directory PowerPack:
1. The Quest AD cmdlets allow you to connect to many different directory services.
2. Opening a connection to a directory service with the Quest AD cmdlets changes a global variable that is used automatically by other cmdlets in the same snapin when you don’t explicitly indicate what connection to use.
3. In PowerGUI you can create or import other PowerPacks that may open their own connections to different directory services using the Quest AD cmdlets, Active Directory or otherwise.
4. In PowerShell, whether you are using the Quest AD cmdlets interactively or invoking a script that uses them, you are likely only working with one set of data from one directory service at a time in a logical manner.  Working in a user interface that is built on top of PowerShell is less restrictive, allowing you to move more freely between multiple data sets from multiple sources (directory services in this case) in what would be considered an illogical manner as far as script creation goes.

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Provisioning users in Active Directory with PowerShell and the QAD cmdlets

Kirk Munro3 Comments

As part of the EnergizeIT tour that I was on for the past three weeks, I did a quick introduction to PowerShell and then showed how the ability to automate tasks using PowerShell can make the job of an IT administrator much, much easier.  The scenario for the automation example I used was this: your HR department contacts you on Friday afternoon and tells you there are a bunch of new users coming in next week and you need to make the accounts right away.  The actual number is arbitrary because PowerShell scripts are the same for 1 user as they are for 1000000 users (exaggerated as that might be), but for my example I used a dozen users.

The point with this example was to show you how you can accomplish a task like this quickly regardless of the number of users being created and go home on time for date night, your son’s baseball game, etc.  This demonstration was very well received, and at the end of the demonstration I promised that I would post the script I wrote during the demo here in my blog.  The script that I post here may look slightly different from the script you saw me run at your tour event because I wanted to make sure shared the answer to a question someone asked me during the tour: How do I set the password for the new users when I create them?

For those of you who didn’t see the live demonstration, note that the csv file I used (C:\Users\Poshoholic\Documents\NewHires.csv) contained the following text:

FirstName,LastName,Title
Dmitry,Prosser,Software Developer 4
Oisin,Hill,Quality Analyst 1
Jeffrey,Shell,Senior Support Representative
Don,Munro,Software Developer 1
Charlie,Shaw,Project Manager
Marco,van Oursow,HR Assistant
Brandon,Russel,Product Manager
Keith,Hicks,Software Developer 3
Marc,Grehan,Product Marketing Manager
Karl,Jones,Quality Analyst 3
Kirk,Lee,Quality Analyst 1
Thomas,Sotnikov,IT Analyst 2

(FYI: if you think those names look familiar, I took the first names and last names of 12 PowerShell MVPs and mixed them up)

During the demonstration, the script below was built up iteratively within the PowerShell console so that you could see the thought process involved in creating a script that way.  In this blog post however, I’m simply going to post the finished script.  If you have questions about the demonstration or want to refresh your memory on how you could build a script like this iteratively, let me know.  The finished script to create the users from the csv file simply looks like this:

Import-Csv ‘C:\Users\Poshoholic\Documents\NewHires.csv‘ `
    | Add-Member -Name Name -MemberType ScriptProperty -Value {$this.FirstName + ‘ ‘ + $this.LastName} -PassThru `
    | Add-Member -Name SamAccountName -MemberType ScriptProperty -Value {($this.FirstName[0] + $this.LastName.Replace(‘ ‘,”)).SubString(0,20)} -PassThru `
    | New-QADUser -City Ottawa -UserPassword ‘P4$$w0rd‘ -ParentContainer poshoholicstudios.com/users

Please note the following if you want to use this as a basis for your own script:

  1. You can copy this script from my blog and paste it directly into the PowerGUI Script Editor where you can customize it to meet your needs (be careful of the word wrap – there should be four lines of script once you paste it in PowerGUI).  Alternatively if you want the script already in a ps1 file, you can download it here.
  2. This example requires the Quest AD cmdlets to create the new users.  Once you have those installed, don’t forget to load them in PowerShell using Add-PSSnapin or in PowerGUI using Libraries in the File menu.
  3. This shows the finished script I built during the demonstration, with the addition of the assignment of the default user password value as P4$$w0rd.  Whatever you use for the default password value, it must meet your password requirements in your lab.
  4. If you want to run this without making changes, don’t forget to append -WhatIf at the end of the last line in the script.

Don’t be afraid to ask me questions about any of this, whether you need help customizing this script to make it work in your environment or just want an explanation of how the script works.  I’m always happy to help!

Kirk out.

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Essential PowerShell: Use non-portable console customizations sparingly

Kirk Munro2 Comments

Isn’t it odd how issues with software are often raised in groups?  I’ve been helping people use software for a long time and I find it uncanny how when I come across an issue once, there are bound to be two or three other occurrences of the same issue just about to be brought to my attention.  Maybe it just seems that way because once I’m on track to discovering the issue I notice other occurrences of the same issue more easily.  All I know is that this happens all the time.

Recently one such issue came to my attention quite a few times and it needs to be talked about.  Any of the following questions were used by those facing the issue:

  • Why doesn’t this command work in that PowerShell console?
  • Why did my PowerShell script work when I ran it here but it doesn’t work when I run it there?
  • Why can’t I find command commandName?  It worked fine when I used it in the other console.
  • I used to be able to use drive driveName, but I can’t anymore.  Why?

The answer to these questions lies in the recognition of one area where PowerShell is not very consistent: through the use of customized PowerShell consoles.

Since PowerShell has been out now for over a year, many product teams now provide PowerShell snapins for their products.  This includes Microsoft products like Exchange, System Center Operations Manager, System Center Virtual Machine Manager, SQL Server and IIS (among others) as well as ISV products like VMware ESX and Server (the VI toolkit) and Quest ActiveRoles Server (the QAD cmdlets).  And there are others who provide PowerShell snapins for a particular business need, like SDM Software’s Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) Cmdlets, /n software’s NetCmdlets, and SoftwareFx’s PowerGadgets.  Many (the majority, in fact) of these snapins come with their own customized PowerShell console.  These customized console are designed to do one or more of the following:

  1. Display welcome text with help.
  2. Show a tip of the day.
  3. Run in elevated mode on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
  4. Load the PowerShell snapin(s) relevant to the product that the shell customization came with.
  5. Change the current location to a provider that was included with the snapin(s) or a drive that was created within the customized shell.
  6. Create custom commands (functions and aliases) to make it easier to use the snapin(s).
  7. Prompt the user for connection-related information to establish a connection required for the cmdlets to work.

There are definitely other possibilities of how these customized consoles might be used, but this list gives you the general idea.  Most of these customizations are helpful because it gives the PowerShell newcomer a starting point; however, more than half of them can give users the wrong impression and cause them to ask the questions listed above when they use other PowerShell consoles.  Let’s look at some examples.

One thing in common among each of the customized consoles is that they load the PowerShell snapin(s) relevant to the product that the shell customization came with.  The Exchange Management Shell loads the two snapins that come with Exchange, so that users don’t have to do this to use Exchange cmdlets:

Add-PSSnapin -Name `
Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin
Add-PSSnapin -Name `
Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Support

This might not seem like a big issue, however in practice it seems to give users the false impression that they can simply call the cmdlets they need from any PowerShell script or console, which ultimately results in head-scratching when commands or a script don’t work somewhere else.  And as indicated, this is common among each of the customized consoles, so the IIS PowerShell Management Console, System Center Operations Manager Command Shell, Windows PowerShell with PowerGadgets, and others all do the same thing, loading their respective snapin automatically.

Another customization that seems to be common is for consoles to provide custom commands (aliases and functions) that are only available in that particular console.  VMware does this in their VMware VI Toolkit (for Windows).  When you open that console, you are presented with a message that shows you four commands as useful starting points, three of which only work in the VMware VI Toolkit (for Windows) shell (FYI, the commands I’m referring to are Get-VICommand, Get-VC and Get-ESX).  You can imagine that causes confusion when someone is trying to use one of these commands in another console.  Of course VMware isn’t the only one that does this.  The Exchange Management Shell creates three commands that are only available by default in that console (Get-ExCommand, quickref and Get-ExBlog) and the System Center Operations Manager Command Shell creates 10 commands that are only available by default in that console.  I won’t bother listing all of those here because I’m sure you get the picture by now.  Trying to use these commands in other consoles without adding them to the profile or explicitly creating them results in an error indicating that the command was not found and invariably some head scratching for the individual who is trying to run then.

A third type of customization is to check for the presence of a connection and then to prompt users for connection information if a local connection was not detected.  The System Center Operations Manager 2007 Command Shell provides connection management like this in its console.  The connection that is established is not usable outside of that console, nor is it documented accordingly, so users need to be aware that their scripts will have to include commands to make the required connections in order to work in any PowerShell environment.

There are surely going to be other examples of this as different teams customize their console environment to meet their needs.  As a PowerShell end user, when these customized consoles are very convenient, what can we do to make sure we’re aware of what customizations are being made?

Fortunately the console customizations are easy to discover.  Every customized console uses PowerShell’s command line parameters to perform the customizations.  This means viewing the properties of any of the shortcuts used to launch a customized console allows you to see what customizations are being performed by examining the command line parameters for powershell.exe.  The customizations that you need to look at are the PowerShell console file that is used (as identified by the -psconsolefile argument) and the script that is executed (as identified by the -command argument).  The PowerShell console file (psc1 file) is an xml document that defines which snapins should be automatically loaded by PowerShell when it starts.  The snapins identified in this file are silently added to the PowerShell session when it is opened.  The command argument identifies the PowerShell script or PS1 file that will be run after the snapins are loaded.  This script is used to customize the look of the console, create custom commands, manage connections, etc.

Now that you have this information, all you need to do is make sure you are aware of the customizations in the console you are using, particularly those that are not portable to other consoles, so that you don’t make incorrect assumptions when you write your scripts.

Before I close this off, I have a request that I’d like to put out there for snapin developers.  If you’re creating a customized PowerShell console when your snapin is installed, please make an effort to make those customizations self documenting.  I don’t want you to hurt the end user experience your after, but I think a bit of carefully worded output that identifies your console customizations as customizations that are specific to that console would go a long way to educate beginner PowerShell users about how consoles can be customized and what they need to be aware of when switching from one console to the next.  Without that information, users simply aren’t getting the information that they need to use your commands in other console that they might use.  And of course, if you are making custom function that are only available in your customized console, ask yourself, should those function only be available in one console, or should they be available all the time.  Often times I bet the answer is the latter, so please consider making cmdlets for those function you feel are necessary for the right experience when using your snapin.  Otherwise you’re just making it more difficult for your users to have the experience that you want them to have.

Thanks for reading!

Kirk out.

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Public beta of Quest AD cmdlets v1.1 now available

Kirk MunroLeave a comment

Quest Software (my employer, for the record) has just released the first public beta build of version 1.1 of the ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory (aka Quest AD cmdlets).  If you haven’t looked at these cmdlets yet, they fulfill the scripting needs of AD administrators using PowerShell today by providing them with cmdlets to facilitate management of Active Directory.

You’ll quickly notice once you download the beta that the Quest AD cmdlet team has been hard at work too, with 40 cmdlets available in this beta, now including support for security and permission management!  More fun commands to play with!

If you want to download the latest beta, you can find it here.  And feedback is welcome and appreciated on the PowerGUI community site in the AD forums.

Kirk out.

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