Webinar: Microsoft Graph for PowerShell Administrators

Tomorrow, I am kind of going back to my roots for an hour. My friends at Cayosoft (Bob and Andrei – with whom I used to work on QAD cmdlets, the initial community project for Active Directory PowerShell implementation before the official Microsoft one appeared!) asked me to help them with a webinar on the basics of Microsoft Graph and PowerShell SDK for it.

Please join us if you get a chance: Microsoft Graph Basics for PowerShell Admins, Tuesday, July 14, 2 pm EST / 11 am PST.

PowerShell has been designed to provide unified intuitive command-line and scripting administration across many enterprise systems. Ironically, cloud made things difficult again by limiting administration choices and making APIs for cloud systems inconsistent and more dev-oriented.

Now, Microsoft PowerShell SDK (in Preview at the moment) is aiming to bridge that gap.

In this webinar we will explore:

• The basics of PowerShell and Microsoft Graph 
• Connecting to the systems, authentication, and authorization 
• Discoverability of commands, objects, and properties 
• Practical examples of user and group management 
• Current limitations and the ways to work around them 

Please join us: Microsoft Graph Basics for PowerShell Admins, Tuesday, July 14, 2 pm EST / 11 am PST.

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Security Webcast is Today

[UPDATE] Recording of this webcast is available here.

Today at 11:00 AM EDT Randy F. Smith from Ultimate Windows Security is holding a webinar on using PowerShell to ensure Active Directory and Windows Server security. The webcast is sponsored by Quest and free to attend.

Pre-registration is required and the space is limited so you might want to register right away here.

Learn more about the PowerShell AD/Windows security webinar here.

Windows & AD Security Webcast

On June 17, Randy F. Smith from Ultimate Windows Security is holding a webinar on using PowerShell to ensure Active Directory and Windows Server security. The webcast is sponsored by Quest and free to attend.

Here’s the announcement I got from Randy:

Finding users accounts who haven’t logged on in X days is important but there’s no good way to do it in AD.  Yes Active Directory Users and Computers as the “days since last logon” query option but it doesn’t work right, doesn’t display last logon date/time and omits users how have never logged on at all.

Figuring out last logon date and time is complicated.  First, the lastlogon field isn’t displayed anywhere in Active Directory.  Second, that field is updated when you logon but only on the domain controller that authenticates you; the field is never replicated to other DCs.  If your domain is in Windows 2000 Mixed or Native mode, that means you have to query each domain controller for each user account. If your domain is in Windows 2003 higher modes, AD adds a new field called LastLogonTimeStamp which is replicated by default every 7 days.  This field isn’t displayed anywhere in AD either.

This is just one of several problems that have irked me for a decade and now these problems are solved with a new open source utility that I designed and Quest Software graciously implemented called the Windows Security PowerPack.  This is our gift to you for being such an awesome community; I’ll show you how to get the PowerPack and how to use it in my upcoming webinar.

In fact, in this webinar, I will show you 4 Windows/AD security problems that desperately need a solution and then demonstrate how this PowerPack solves them.

PowerPacks are tool sets that snap into PowerGUI which is an open source extensible graphical administrative console for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell.  PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration.

This new PowerPack is just one out of a world of free PowerPacks that solve all kinds of admin problems without coding or even scripting.

Register now for this webinar.  It’s more than real training for free (TM) – this one is real software for free.

Click here to register

CAN’T MAKE THE LIVE EVENT? REGISTER ANYWAY TO GET THE RECORDED VERSION.

Title: Finding Dormant User Accounts in Active Directory
Date: Thursday, June 17, 2010 11:00:00 AM EDT

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
http://www.ultimatewindowssecurity.com/webinars/register.aspx?id=97

Need CPE credit for this or any other webinar? Just visit www.ultimateWindowsSecurity.com, click on the Webinars section, and then the link for CPE credit transcript.

Thanks as always for reading and best wishes on security,
Randy Franklin Smith

Video on creating a PowerPack

If you are considering participating in the PowerPack Challenge contest (which you should ;)) this quick video by Darin will help you get started:

Darin walks you through the process of customizing PowerGUI admin console, exporting the new functionality as a PowerPack, and sharing it on the web.

1. Check it out,
2. Think about what you do day to day at work and what would be the graphical console of your dream,
3. Create it,
4. Submit it to the contest,
5. And become one of the winners! 🙂

Tags: Demo, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, Webcast, video
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Introduction to PowerShell v2

Check out this video to learn how to start using the most important new features of PowerShell 2.0 including background jobs, modules, advanced functions, and function help (HQ and full screen recommended):

Great job by Kirk Munro! I know I will be now using these features a lot more.

Tags: Demo, PowerGUI, PowerShell, PowerShell v2, Tutorial, Webcast, video
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Active Directory and CSV files

Here’s a new quick tip from Darin on AD exports and imports from within PowerGUI:

As usual, short and to the point.

Using CSV and text files in PowerGUI when managing AD is quite common. For example, I have seen people adding script node like:

Get-Content '\\server\share\users.txt' | Get-QADUser

If users.txt has a bunch of usernames (one per line) this outputs actual user accounts to the PowerGUI grid, which you can then manage with all the actions (disable, reset passwords, and so on.)

Alternatively, some customers are just using

Import-Csv

in a node and then define some actions to perform various activities based on the fields in the grid.

Also, although Darin did not show that, you can create your own export to CSV and use something like

Select Name, samAccountName | Export-Csv

to pick specific columns to be exported.

And there’s whole update from CSV scenario… Man, I could go on and on with these! 🙂

Tags: AD, Active Directory, Demo, PowerGUI, PowerShell, Webcast, video
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AD Recycle Bin management console

Windows Server 2008 R2 ships with a great new object undelete feature – Active Directory Recycle Bin. The only problem with this feature (apart from requiring 2008 R2 functional level ;)) is that PowerShell command-line is the only management interface shipped for the feature.

Well, not anymore. Check out the free GUI Kirk has put together with PowerGUI (make sure you click the HD button when watching this and make it full screen):

It keeps amazing me how great PowerGUI is when you need such GUIs on top of anything exposing PowerShell.

Read more about the PowerPack in Kirk’s blog.

Download the PowerPack here.

Dockable panes in PowerGUI 1.9

Quick video from Darin showing a few new (for 1.9) features in the PowerGUI admin console. Check it out:

Build Org Charts with PowerShell

Kirk has recently published his Org Chart PowerPack which frankly I myself have been using a lot lately.

For anyone working in a medium to large size of company this is just a great tool to navigate your organization and even produce html and Visio reports about it:

Does your HR have anything like that? Send them the link to the demo and get them addicted to PowerShell!

Read more about the PowerPack in Kirk’s blog.

Tags: Active Directory, Demo, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, Reporting, Visio, Webcast
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Add great HTML reports to PowerGUI

Kirk has recently published a PowerPack which adds really nice-looking reports to PowerGUI Admin Console. Once you install the pack you will get these reports for any systems you manage: AD, Exchange, Operations Manager, VMware, Hyper-V – you name it.

See this video for details:

Download the PowerPack here.

Tags: PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, Reporting, Webcast, video
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