Dmitry's PowerBlog: PowerShell and beyond » Blogosphere

Adding Direct Reports action

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:34:13 +0000

Here’s my quick addition to Kamran’s “How to export data from Active Directory using the free PowerGUI tool“:

If you might need to find users managed by someone more than once, there are a couple of ways you can make this simpler for your self:

A. Download and install free Org Chart powerpack, or

B. Follow these instructions to add a Direct Reports button to PowerGUI admin console:

1. Start PowerGUI admin console and browse to Active Directory / Users.

2. In the right-hand pane, right-click the category to which you want to add the action and pick New / Script Action from the shortcut menu.

3. In the New Action dialog box, type in the action name (e.g. Direct Reports), and script:

$input | ForEach-Object {
    Get-QADUser -Manager $_
}

(The script is quite trivial: for each user account currently selected in the PowerGUI grid, we get the list of AD users which have this object specified as Manager).

3. On that same dialog box, click the Display Configuration button, and then in the Display results group, select the Display the results in a nested view option.

This tells PowerGUI that your action outputs objects to the grid (which it does – we need to see the reports selected user has!)

4. That’s it! Click OK on both dialog boxes, select the user account whose reports you need to see, and click your newly added Direct Reports action.

Big thanks to Kamran for posting his original tip and video.

Opening up PowerGUI.org

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:20:23 +0000

We have made a change in the blog post webpart at our community site – PowerGUI.org: now it can provide links to blogs more than one blog. Specifically, it now features posts by myself, Kirk Munro, and Shay Levy.

For historical reasons, up to now the webpart only had posts from my blog. Which was obviously a really selfish and outdated thing to have. Shay and Kirk are these days more active on the site forums than I am, and their blogs are well worth following.

Hopefully, this makes staying in touch with the PowerGUI community even easier.

By now means this is limited to just three blogs. If you are active at PowerGUI.org and blog at least once or twice a week about PowerGUI or QAD cmdlets – please contact me and I will happily add your feed in there.

Interactive PowerGUI Blog Badges

Dmitry Sotnikov — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:00:35 +0000

This is part two of the PowerGUI.org blog badges instructions. In part one we learned how to add a PowerGUI graphics widget.

Today I will show how to add a widget dynamically showing your latest threads or messages at our PowerShell discussion forums.

As you can see I have one in the right-hand column of this blog and it looks like:

To add such a widget in wordpress, go to Dashboard/Appearance/Widgets, add an RSS gadget and paste the following RSS feed link (make sure you change my name to your PowerGUI.org name and replace space with %20):

http://www.powergui.org/rss/rssmessages.jspa?categoryID=55&RssUsername=Dmitry%20Sotnikov

For wordpress, the widget will then look like:

Type something like “My recent posts at PowerGUI.org” to the feed title, and select the number of items to show.

Then save the changes and you are good to go!

If you want the widget to display recent threads(rather than posts) use this RSS feed instead:

http://www.powergui.org/rss/rssthreads.jspa?categoryID=55

That’s it. If you want to add graphics – see my previous post.

If you are on platforms other than wordpress or have other ideas of PowerGUI widgets – please post them on your blog and add the link in your comments to this post. Please help us spread the news of PowerShell, PowerGUI and PowerGUI.org to a wider community!

PowerGUI Blog Badges

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:28:50 +0000

The easiest way to promote your favorite PowerShell tool on your blog or website is add one of our PowerGUI.org badges to it. You can borrow the images which Susan posted here or copy/paste the html code from below:

My examples below are for wordpress - this is the platform which I am using and for which I tested these. (Please post your instructions for other platforms.)

Static Images

To add these, add Text widget in your wordpress Dashboard/Appearance/Widgets and paste the corresponding html code:

Instead of PowerGUI.org you can obviously link to a specific forum or even your profile page at PowerGUI.org – just click your username next to your post there to get link to that page. You profile contains whatever information you supplied and links to your latest messages.

Tomorrow I will show how you can create interactive widgets automatically showing your latest messages or threads in our forums.

New VMware PowerShell Blog

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:00:54 +0000

Scott Herold has just started blogging.

Scott is one of key guys at Vizioncore and the guy behind some of the most widely used tools in the VMware space. He has recently become converted to PowerShell through his use of VI Toolkit and PowerGUI, and was even helping Kirk with the VMware PowerPack.

It is very cool to see people coming to PowerShell from their specific platform areas, and I highly recommend checking out Scott’s blog if you are managing VMware infrastructure. I myself will go and subscribe once I click Publish for this blog post.

You can find Scott’s blog here.

OCS blog by Curtis

Dmitry Sotnikov — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:38:09 +0000

Curtis Johnstone – the author of the best OCS Management Console (which coincidentally is a PowerPack ) has just started blogging!

His blog already has posts on the DNS records Office Communicator uses for automated sign-in, the ports OCS requires you to open on your firewalls, and on the latest updates to his OCS PowerPack.

If you are working with Office Communications Server, this is one of those blogs you need to watch! I obviously hope that it will also have as much of the related PowerShell content as Curtis can fit in. You can find the blog here.

PowerShell blogs in Russian

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:32:21 +0000

Local Microsoft and PowerShell fans at Platforma 2008 talked me into setting up a separate blog on PowerShell in Russian. So if you are a Russian-speaker – you’ve got another source of information available. From now on all Russia-related blog entries will go there.

Other two PowerShell blogs in Russian you might want to check out are the ones by:

MCS Ireland using PowerGUI

Dmitry Sotnikov — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:43:50 +0000

Looks like Microsoft Consulting Services in Ireland started using PowerGUI for Exchange 2007 management. Check this out: Exchange 2007 Powershell Answer –The PowerGUI

Creating test AD users (improved)

Dmitry Sotnikov — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 17:50:21 +0000

One of the kicks of PowerShell is taking someone else’s script and making it even shorter. This was exactly my first thought when I found this test AD user creation script by Austin (found via Bob).

Austin’s script is perfectly fine but you can make it shorter by getting rid of csv step and enabling the accounts on the fly.

So here’s how I would create 500 test user accounts:

1..500 | ForEach-Object { New-QADUser -ParentContainer ps64.local/test -Name "testuser$_" -SamAccountName "testuser$_" -UserPrincipalName "testuser$_@example.com" -FirstName "testUser$_" -LastName "example$_" -UserPassword "password_123" | Enable-QADUser }

I think this is pretty self-describing. I am using the 1..500 cycle to get a collection of these 500 numbers, and then put them inside the string parameters (make sure you use double quotes!) in the ForEach-Object cycle. Finally the objects are passed to Enable-QADUser so the accounts get enabled.

Pretty cool, eh?

Customizing syntax highlight

Dmitry Sotnikov — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:45:24 +0000

Cash has a post on his blog on customizing the way PowerGUI highlights PowerShell code. Check this out if you are not 100% satisfied with the default way. (Direct XML edits are dangerous, use with caution, back up, bla-bla-bla…)