MVP Award 2011

Look what I’ve got in my email. 🙂 My Microsoft MVP (most valuable professional) award for another year.

This is probably the 4th year I am getting the award, and is a great honor to me, and also really an opportunity to once again say that all my work for the PowerShell community is in fact a team work and not something I just do myself. So to everyone on the  team of PowerGUI, AD cmdlets, powergui.org forums, and PowerShell Deep Dive – huge thanks!

This award is really a testament of the great work we all do together to make PowerShell such a great technology and community.

Also, congrats to all other MVPs who got re-awarded this weekend, as well as the new PowerShell MVPs: Bartek Bielawski and Alexander Chebotov (aka Kazun)!

UPDATE: Denniver Reining PowerGUI Script Editor Color Picker and Snippet Manager add-ons fame is also a newly awarded MVP!!! Congratulations Denniver!

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PowerGUI named #1 among free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

Considering how hot and crowded virtualization space is, it is just amazing that PowerGUI (combined with PowerCLI and Community PowerPack) is number one among the free tools in this space!

See the Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011 lists here, and let me quote the PowerGUI entry for you:

1. PowerCLI, PowerGUI, and the vSphere Community PowerPack

This set of free tools ranked number 1 on last years free tool list and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. When you combine these three products together it becomes Voltron. Yes, I just used a Voltron reference! These three products bring with them a set of tools that can’t be found in anything else. PowerCLI is the framework that makes it all possible. PowerGUI is the interface that enables anyone from a beginner to advanced user to become proficient. The PowerPack is the secret sauce that brings added functionality to every vSphere admin. Quest is currently working on updates for vSphere 5, but most of the functionality was there with the PowerCLI vSphere 5 beta I had been testing. Try it out and you will know why this tool continues to be on the Top 10 list.

 

Show your support: Vote for AD cmdlets, PowerShell, and PowerGUI

If Get-QADUser (or any other QAD cmdlet) or PowerGUI ever saved your day – now is a good time to show your love and spread the news. 🙂

Windows IT Pro magazine put us in their community award finals. So if you want to show your support:

1. Simply go to the award voting page,

2. For the first nomination, Best Active Directory & Group Policy Product, pick Quest Software ActiveRoles Management Shell for Active Directory (who would have thought that the official name was so long):

3. And obviously leave them a note in the Give us a killer quote about your winner! box.

4. Also, believe it or not 17. Best Microsoft Product has PowerShell as one of the options.

5. 21. Best Scripting Tool has Quest Software PowerGUI:

6. And obviously feel free to either ignore all other categories or cast your vote there as well.

Cast your vote now – before the contest is over.

And the winner is PowerGUI

Remember that weird Windows IT Pro contest in which they put PowerGUI against gmail, iTunes, and a thousand other free and open source products?

Well, the funniest part is – thanks to your support – we won the silver award in that huge category!

Here’s what the magazine had to say (and with which I happily agree!):

“There are a lot of PowerShell scripting and GUI tools on the market these days, but PowerGUI remains one of the best, and it’s free!” —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro

And my congratulations to 14 other product teams from Quest winning in multiple other categories – great job by everyone and a reminder of the comprehensiveness of the product set we have here:

In Windows It Pro’s Community Choice Awards:

• Gold for Authentication Services (Best Interoperability Product),
• Silver for Group Policy Manager/GPOAdmin^® (Best Active Directory and Group Policy Product),
• Bronze for ChangeAuditor^® (Best Auditing and Compliance Product).

Quest’s database management solutions received SQL Server Magazine Editors’ Best Awards recognition in two categories:

• Best Backup & Recovery (SQL Server) Product: LiteSpeed^® for SQL Server (Gold)
• Best Development SQL Server Tool: Toad^® for SQL Server (Gold)

Quest also was recognized by the editors at Windows IT Pro in the following categories:

• Best Free or Open Source IT Tool: PowerGUI^™ (Silver)
• Best Auditing & Compliance Product: ChangeAuditor^® (Silver)
• Best Interoperability Product: Authentication Services (Bronze)
• Best Systems Management Product: GPOAdmin^® (Bronze)

Quest’s Windows management products also received nods from the readers of Redmond and SQL Server Magazine. In the Redmond Readers’ Choice Awards:

• Quest Migration Manager received both the “ISV Winner” and “Preferred Product” in the Best Migration Product category.
• Quest Defender was recognized as a “Preferred Product” in the Best Smart Card/Biometric/Two-Factor Authentication System category.

SQL Server Magazine and Windows IT Pro’s Community Choice Awards named:

• Site Administrator for SharePoint the gold award winner for Best SharePoint Product.

SQL Server Magazine’s Community Choice Awards gave:

• Quest’s Foglight^® Performance Analysis for SQL Server the silver for Best Database Monitoring and Performance Products, and
• Spotlight^® on SQL Server Enterprise was named a “Preferred Product” by Redmond Readers’ Choice Awards.

Vote for OCS PowerPack

Please help us by casting your vote for PowerGUI’s Office Communications Server PowerPack by Curtis Johnstone at the SearchExchange’s Exchange Unified Communications vote.

Note: the page is a bit confusing because they have some product ads right on the page. Ignore those 😉 and click the Vote here link instead.

OCS PowerPack has been a huge success. It has already been downloaded more than 3400 times, and is being used in a lot of companies as a replacement or an addition to the native OCS management tools. However, even considering all that it is still very impressive that it kind of started living a life of its own and even gets nominated to awards like the SearchExchange one!

If you have not tried the PowerPack yet check out my write up about it here.

Then cast your vote here. 😉

Tags: OCS, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, awards
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Breakthrough Product of TechEd 2008

At the TechEd 2008 in Orlando PowerGUI has received the highest award of the show – The Breakthrough Product of the show.

Here’s the award description:

Breakthrough Product

This award is for the best single product of the Tech•Ed 2008 IT Professionals, and could be from any IT Pro award sub-category.

I am super-excited. This is an incredible achievement for the team, and frankly for the whole PowerGUI and PowerShell community. Without you guys providing all the feedback and feature requests, contributing your PowerPacks to the library, localizing us to every language in the world, and simply spreading the word we would not have been where we got. Love you all! 🙂

You can find the list of winners in various subcategories here.

Tags: Conferences, PowerGUI, PowerShell, TechEd, TechEd2008, awards
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Vote for PowerGUI

We need your help.

As I mentioned last week PowerGUI got into the finals of the best of TechEd award. It turns out there is also Attendees Pick contest and they have already set up the online poll.

So if you are attending TechEd IT Professionals this year, please spend a minute, go to the site, find PowerGUI in the long list (use Ctrl-F or scroll down to the Systems Management and Operations category), and vote for us.

Tags: Conferences, PowerGUI, PowerShell, TechEd, TechEd2008, awards
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PowerGUI in the Best of TechEd finals

PowerGUI (our free PowerShell admin console and IDE) just got into the finals of the Best of TechEd 2008 competition!

Very exciting considering the products competing for the award, and the fact that last year this exact award went to PowerShell itself. Seems natural to give it to PowerGUI this time around, right? 😉

Tags: Conferences, PowerGUI, PowerShell, TechEd, TechEd2008, awards
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Another chance to vote for AD cmdlets

If you love AD cmdlets and they make your AD administration easier, here’s another chance for you to give back. Please vote for the AD cmdlets’ parent product – ActiveRoles Server in SC Magazine: http://www.scmagazine.com/us/awards/categories/26155/best-identity-management-solution/

This will help us make more money on ActiveRoles and continue paying the AD cmdlets development costs. So I guess this is one of those “will work for your votes” situations.

P.S. Other Quest products nominated include InTrust and Reporter. So if you are a fan of those feel free to cast your vote in the corresponding categories too.

Tags: AD cmdlets, Quest Software, awards
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AD cmdlets in the voting booth

Found this via Jackson. ActiveRoles Server – the AD rules, roles, policy, identity management, provisioning, etc. product which has the AD cmdlets as a freeware component (and frankly pays the bill for the effort) is featured in a few nominations in the Info Security reader’s choice awards.

So if you like the cmdlets, one of the ways to show that is going to the site and voting for ActiveRoles Server over there.

A few other Quest products are nominated as well, so if you happen to be using them – feel free to add them to the ballot.

Tags: AD cmdlets, ActiveRoles Server, Blogosphere, PowerShell, awards
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