Quest and PowerShell
PowerShell is an amazing and extremely powerful scripting language. Microsoft is building much of their products on this tool and integrating a PowerShell management shell for a vast majority of their products. Good examples of this are the Exchange Management Shell, originally released with Exchange 2007 and included with Exchange 2010. Data Protection Manager 2010 also included a management shell. Systems Center Configuration Manager 2012 will include a Management Shell when it is released. Learning PowerShell and becoming proficient in it is a must.
For the administrators that are in a hurry or don’t want to re-invent the wheel, Quest Software has created a free set of canned PowerShell cmdlets for common functions and those pesky repetitive tasks. Quest also has created an efficient Administrative Console GUI based application that uses PowerShell on the backend. The Quest PowerGUI is available in free and paid versions. If offers integration for Active Directory, Exchange and VMware. The main difference between the free and paid versions is that the paid version, named PowerGUI Pro, can be used from mobile devices and web browsers. It can also execute remote scripts. PowerGUI can also be extend using additional libraries available from Quest. The cmdlets and PowerGUI tool are built on PowerShell 2.0.
-Pete Cavanaugh, PEI
More information can be found at:
Quest and PowerShell
https://www.oneidentity.com/products/active-roles/
PowerGUI:
https://www.powergui.org/index.jspa
PowerGUI Libraries
