AD team launches PowerShell blog

As you probably know, Microsoft’s Active Directory team is going to ship their own set of PowerShell cmdlets to manage AD as a part of Windows Server 2008 R2 (see the current list here).

The AD PowerShell folks at Microsoft have just launched a blog you can use to get more insight into what’s coming: Pipelining AD – one object at a time. 🙂

Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, Microsoft, PowerShell
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PowerShell v2 Release Schedule

Here at TechEd EMEA Jeffrey Snover has just announced detailed release schedule for PowerShell v2 (currently available as CTP 2):

• December 2008 – CTP 3 (Community Technology Preview) or Beta 1 if it meets the internal criteria and all names/features are finalized.
• RTM – end of 2009/early 2010 as part of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.
• RTM for XP, 2003, Vista, and 2008 – as a downloadable package (with new WinRM bundled in there) a few months after that (that is H1 2010).

This is the first time these details were announced – common expectation was that PowerShell v2 would become available as a standalone package for all platforms mid-2009.

Tags: Conferences, IT Forum, Microsoft, PowerShell, PowerShell v2, TechEd, TechEd2008
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It’s official: Microsoft’s AD cmdlets in Server 2008 R2

We all knew that Microsoft’s AD team was working on a set of PowerShell cmdlets of their own, but now we know when and how these are going to be shipped. Jeffrey published stats on the PowerShell cmdlets in the upcoming (in 2010) Windows Server R2.

If you look carefully through the list you will see that one of the snapins is called… activedirectory and contains 76 cmdlets. And these are just for the AD itself. There are other related snapins, like GroupPolicy (25 cmdlets) and ADRMS.PS.Admin (15 Cmdlets).

As far as I know AD and RMS are also getting PowerShell providers.

Sounds like in a year and a half or so we will get a pretty comprehensive cmdlets coverage from Microsoft. Meanwhile, there are obviously free 3rd-party solutions providing similar functionality:

• Quest’s AD cmdlets,
• PSCX AD provider,
• SDM Software’s GPO cmdlets.

See full Windows Server 2008 snapin list in Jeffrey’s post.

Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, GPO, Microsoft, PSCX, PowerShell, cmdlets
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Groove strikes back: Live Mesh

Am I the only one seeing that Microsoft’s Live Mesh announced yesterday is conceptually a new version of Groove?

Ever since Microsoft bought Groove in 2005 the product seemed to be a foster child in the Office family. Not included in most of Office SKUs, not really advancing the technology, lacking a clear place on the family picture (instead standing somewhat vaguely behind the really loved SharePoint).

Last week on the MVP Summit Groove MVPs applied significant pressure on Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer (see transcript) trying to get an answer of where Groove is going and basically not getting much. I would summarize the official vision as: Groove is becoming more integrated with SharePoint, but it will not become a complete offline solution for it any time soon, nor is there a decision whether it should.

Well, yesterday, Groove stroke back. And it is not called Groove any more – it’s Live Mesh. But just go through the screenshot gallery and you’ll see Windows folders becoming Groove-like workspaces with file sharing and sync across devices with associated members lists, news, and discussions.

In addition to the basic Groove functionality, there is also a web access page (hosted by Microsoft) and remote desktop functionality (kind of lame if the goal is to replace an application engine, but probably fine for troubleshooting and getting to your workplace remotely during trips).

So to me, Live Mesh is not Microsoft’s OS in the cloud. It is the new real Groove (as opposed to the old Groove shipped with Office) developed by the core Groove fans (including Ray himself) and having no SharePoint dependencies this time around. 😉

An offtopic for this blog, but I could not help it.

Tags: MVP, Microsoft, Offtopic, SharePoint
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Microsoft working on PowerShell for AD

One of the key news from the MVP Summit is that Microsoft team has confirmed that they have PowerShell support for Active Directory in the works.

Obviously all the details are under NDA except for the fact that they are working on that – Dushyant Gill allowed us to share that.

I guess the only other thing I can tell is that it is not coming to you right away – you will have to be patient for that a little bit longer. However… 🙂 let me tell you that: whatever you learn while using Quest AD cmdlets today will be the knowledge you will be able to reuse eventually when Microsoft’s version ships. 😉

Tags: AD, AD cmdlets, Active Directory, MVP, Microsoft, PowerShell, cmdlets
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PowerGUI Survey – Please respond

We need your help and a couple of minutes of your time. Please go to this survey page and answer 5 simple questions on how you use PowerGUI today and where we should take it in the future.
As you know, our goal with PowerGUI is to keep it free (and as much as possible registration-free as well). However, we need information on how you are using it so we know where to concentrate our development efforts. This survey is one of the ways you can help us with that.

Finally, Quest and Microsoft are looking for joint case-study opportunities around PowerGUI and Windows Server 2008. If you may consider participating in one of those, please indicate it in the survey so we can follow-up and make you one of IT Heroes of tomorrow.

We really tried to keep the survey as short and straight-forward as possible, so we hope you can spare a minute or two on the survey page as a way to support our efforts on maintaining the free PowerGUI tool we all love and use. Thanks! 🙂

Tags: Microsoft, PowerGUI, PowerShell, Quest Software, Windows Server 2008
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