We have arrived – ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 and PowerShell – Truly Better Together

I’ve been writing and presenting on scripting ConfigMgr (and SMS) for many years now – in fact, I have a feeling that my MVP Colleague Kaido Järvemets (a PowerShell-ConfigMgr guru) was probably a middle-school student when I started scripting SMS 2003!! I’ve presented at many a MMS (since 2005) and user groups about leveraging VBScript and PowerShell with ConfigMgr, as well as co-authored the cult classic SMS 2003 Recipes: A problem-Solution Approach (I still refer to the code from that book  regularly). That’s enough reminiscing-Just know that pretty much all scripting that has been accomplished to date with ConfigMgr is either through COM objects or WMI. For years, the community has been begging for native PowerShell integration with ConfigMgr.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived.

ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 Beta includes over 300 PowerShell cmdlets, and the the RTM of ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 will include many more. My goal over the next few months will be to drill into these cmdlets and demonstrate how to easily leverage them to make your job easier, more consistent, and safer than it is to use the GUI. Don’t get me wrong, the GUI has its place and always will-but for frequent tasks, you will find a more repeatable and fail-proof process by using PowerShell.

As my mentor Jeffrey Snover frequently says during his presentations, the goal is to allow you to “Think, Type, Do” – Think of what you’re trying to accomplish, type a cmdlet (using standard PowerShell verbs), and Do the desired action.

If you haven’t learned PowerShell yet, please do so before it’s an emergency. Come on – all the cool kids are doing it— you should too.

Stay tuned, and if you’re looking to accomplish a specific task, send me your comments at ramseyg@hotmail.com.

Greg