Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Formatting with PowerShell

PowerShell is an increasingly important tool for the IT Admin. In it’s early version, it didn’t do much, but with products like Exchange, SharePoint 2010, and System Centre being so PowerShell focused, it’s a tool every IT Admin needs to learn and learn how to leverage.

A key aspect of PowerShell is output – getting the output you need. In some cases, that output can be quick and dirty: how many mail boxes are currently on Mailbox-Server-1? Or how many handles has the DNS server used (and has that changed since last week).

But often, output needs to look good as well as being accurate. PowerShell has a wealth of formatting capabilities (and with 3rd party tools like PowerGadgets, you have a bunch more).

I’ve written a two part article for The Scripting Guys to explain some of these options. You can find Part 1 at: http://tinyurl.com/yhmvvul, and Part 2 at: http://tinyurl.com/ykt7wq6.

These articles are the basis for one of the modules in my upcoming PowerShell Master Class that I blogged about last week.  I’ve taken Module 3 of the class and turned it into these articles, although I’ll be adding some more stuff into the Master Class!

I’d be grateful for comments!

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