Exchange 2010 PowerPack is here

For all PowerGUI administrators, Konrad Sagala has just posted his first release of PowerPack for Exchange Server 2010.

PowerPacks are extensible open-source add-ons for PowerGUI Administrative Console. Once you import them into the console you get rich MMC-like UI for a new platform. It is great to see that Exchange 2010 support is now available for PowerGUI and great to see a member of the PowerGUI community stepping up to provide that!

Download the Exchange 2010 PowerPack and post your comments to the page (log in required to post comments) to let Konrad know what you think.

Exchange 2003 PowerPack Updated

If you manage your Exch 2003 with PowerGUI make sure you upgrade to the latest version of the PowerPack which Jonathan Medd has made available.

It adds a nice Database Whitespace report added, and more importantly autoupdate capabilities – so from now on getting new patches and features becomes way easier.

Get the PowerPack here or read more in Jonathan’s blog here.

PowerShell day at NITkon 2010

[UPDATE] Unfortunately, due to financial troubles NITkon in general and the PowerShell day in particular got canceled. See you some other time in another place.

On March 17, Bruce Payette, Thomas Lee and myself will be delivering a full-day deep dive PowerShell feast at NITkon 2010 in Oslo.

The whole conference is a great event bringing you up to speed on all the latest and greatest Microsoft technology: AD, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, Exchange 2010, OCS 2007 R2, SharePoint 2010, NAP, RMS, PKI, Cloud Computing and so on (see conference program here). And of cource we will make sure that there will be plenty of PowerShell.

So if you are in Oslo or fancy getting there for a few days in March – I am really looking forward to see you there!

Is he getting this email?

Quite often I need to know whether a user is a member of a set of groups to which I am sending an email or which have permissions to a particular resource. The trick to check this is actually just to use Get-QADMemberOf and supply the name of the user and the list of groups:

Get-QADMemberOf -Identity Maria -Name GroupA, GroupB -Indirect

This cmdlet will return the list of groups from the list to which the user belongs or nothing ($null) if this account is not a member of any of them (including indirect membership). One of those simple tasks incredibly frustrating without PowerShell!

A PowerShell present for Valentine’s Day

This desktop wallpaper is probably the geekiest present you can give to your significant other this weekend. Just pick the desktop resolution and make him/her feel special:

• 1024×768,
• 1280×800,
• 1280×960,
• 1280×1024,
• 1440×900,
• 1600×1200,
• 1920×1200

For greater effect also try adding something along these lines to the PowerShell profile:
(New-Object -com SAPI.SpVoice).Speak( "Be my Valentine!", 1 )

Happy Valentine’s Day! 🙂

PowerGUI Pro vs PowerGUI

Here’s a quick summary of the differences between the free and commercial versions of PowerGUI:

	PowerGUI 2.0	PowerGUI Pro 2.0
Administrative Console	Fully functional	Identical to freeware
Script Editor and Debugger	Fully functional except version control	Same as PowerGUI plus support for version control systems
MobileShell	Not included	Present: Remote PowerShell access from browser and mobile devices
Support	Forums	Full commercial support from Quest Software
Availability	Available	Currently in beta

So basically, the freeware version is not going away. Moreover, we keep investing in freeware (as we are now starting to work on PowerGUI 2.1 a big chuck of our investment is going into both versions). What we are doing, is trying to evaluate for new features whether they make more sense in individual administrator/enthusiast scenarios, or more in enterprise setting. This is why MobileShell, version control, and technical support went into the commercial version, and the rest stayed in the free one.

I hope this makes sense. You can hear Darin and I discuss this more in the PowerScripting Podcast published recently.

We are very excited about both versions of the product and their roadmap for 2010!

TEC 2010 = The most deep-technical Exchange event of 2010

Exchange is one of the greatest and most advanced PowerShell-enabled platform Microsoft has. It seems that quite often you can look at what Exchange team is doing to figure out what others will do a few years later. And obviously a significant number of PowerShell fans and readers of this blog are Exchange administrators. So with all this in mind I could not help cross-posting here the note I got from David Sengupta about the Exchange track of the upcoming TEC 2010 event:

This year at TEC2010 we will have what I believe will be the most deep-technical Exchange line-up at any Exchange event globally this year.

We have many of our speakers lined up, and highlights include:

• The first Exchange “15” session at a public conference anywhere on the planet: a requirements gathering NDA session with Microsoft’s Karl Bystrom http://tec2010.com/general-information/exchange-training/
• David Espinoza – who has run the core Exchange customer TAP program for Microsoft for years and is one of the most experienced Exchange folks around – will be leading another NDA session on Exchange 2010 SP1 (i.e., a preview of what’s coming in SP1, and what early experiences are deploying in TAP). This will be the first public event discussing Exchange 2010 SP1. David rarely speaks at public events, but is hooked on speaking at TEC.
• Microsoft’s Konstantin Ryvkin will be back with a keynote on how Microsoft runs Exchange. Always one of the top-rated sessions.
• Microsoft’s Brett Shirley will be back for what will likely be the most technical Exchange session – a 400+ level deep dive into ESE internals again this year. You won’t find anything this technical at any other event, guaranteed, and you won’t find Brett speaking at any other events – he is another TEC die-hard. If you dream about B-tree splits, this is for you. Let’s hope he doesn’t wear the same t-shirt this year … but even if he does, we’re fortunate to have him.
• Microsoft’s Ross Smith IV and Scott Schnoll will be anchoring the core Exchange track sessions. Both are extremely experienced high-rating speakers who are on the regular circuit of all major Exchange events.
• Other top speakers include Juergen Hasslauer, Ilse Van Criekinge, and Michael B Smith.
• We are also excited to have convinced HP’s Lee Mackey to speak on OCS – Lee is the most deep-technical OCS we know, and very experienced with all angles including a myriad of device and PBX integration scenarios. Lee rarely speaks at public events (though he’s usually a critical heckler at the back of the room for many OCS events) so we are excited to have him at TEC.
• We’ve also landed Anthony Vitnell to talk about Dimension Data’s deployment of OCS+Cisco Call Manager – we have been hearing that a large percentage of our customer base is deploying hybrid Microsoft/Cisco UC environments, so we though this would be a great session to add this year

Additional session are still in the works, including (of course) migration, archiving, and a few hands-on workshops. Stay tuned. Abstracts will be updated here as more sessions and speakers are confirmed: http://www.theexpertsconference.com/agenda-speakers/exchange-training/session-abstracts/

If you are as excited as I am, see you in Los Angeles, April 25-28.

PowerGUI Olympics Wallpaper

Following the popular tradition of seasonal PowerGUI desktop wallpapers we thought we would get you a new one – in time for the starting 2010 Winter Olympics. After all, IT Professionals are in a way sportsmen and just happen to not have time to compete in the official games in Vancouver. 😉

So if you still want to be partial to the upcoming sports madness you can download the wallpaper from PowerGUI downloads page or right from this screen resolution list:

• 1024×768
• 1280×800
• 1280×960
• 1280×1024
• 1440×900
• 1600×1200
• 1900×1200

MobileShell and PowerGUI Pro podcast published

PowerScripting podcast episode in which Hal and Jonathan met with Darin Pendegraft, Kirk Munro and myself and discussed the latest news from the PowerGUI team just got posted here.

There were a lot of great questions ranging from the way our team works, origins of the project, differences between free and commercial versions of PowerGUI, extensibility APIs, and even future roadmap.

Check out the podcast recording here.

Provide your feature requests for QAD cmdlets

Now is a great time! QAD cmdlets 1.3 shipped and we are in the process of fixing bugs and implementing the improvements which our community has already requested. And we have cycles to do more!

So if there is something in our free AD cmdlets that is missing and could have made your life easier – please go to our Active Directory and PowerShell forum and post your suggestions to this thread – no matter how wild they are. 😉