Microsoft PowerShell: the next big thing for Windows admins
I think Windows PowerShell is going to be huge. It’s gonna take a while though.
I have a load of jobs that need to be automated. Regular, boring stuff that my computer could do quite happily. Problem is, at least on Microsoft Windows, automation isn’t easy and usually requires some degree of programming abilitity.
Windows has always been bad at automation. I am happy that Microsoft has finally taken notice and come up with Windows PowerShell.
Plenty of people have tried to crack this problem before, but none have had the kind of ecosystem developing abilities that Microsoft can bring to the party. PowerShell is just the beginning. It brings the building blocks, but the ecosystem brings the rest. Already a nice ecosystem is developing bringing books, cmdlets, scripts and the like in its wake.
I don’t have any empirical evidence for this, but I really believe that Windows admins have been wanting an easy way to automate things for some time.
When major Microsoft products incorporate PowerShell manageability at their core, then PowerShell will go main stream in a big way. Microsoft Exchange 2007 already has PowerShell built in. The next version of Windows Server will have it built in too. In fact, Exchange 2007’s own GUI management is built on top of PowerShell. That is how significant Microsoft thinks PowerShell is.