Ode to Our New Script Gallery
(This post was initially made on the Microsoft Press Blog.)
Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson here. At long last we have a real Script Gallery for the Script Center. This was a project that was in the planning stages for nearly a year. The great thing about the new Script Gallery is the way it fosters community involvement. The people who best know the needs of the IT pro are the IT pro community—because you live, eat, and breath corporate IT on a daily basis. You are the ones who get the help desk calls on Monday morning at 8:00 A.M. or the emergency alerts on Friday night at 2:00 A.M., and therefore you know the pain points involved in being an IT pro.
With the new Script Gallery, you the community are in charge of submitting your own scripts. You provide the tags, summary, and description when you submit your scripts. Submitted scripts are immediately available. This feature, in and of itself, would be a great improvement over the old manual process. However, as they say on late night television, “But wait there’s more…”
The new Script Gallery has community ratings, rankings, and discussion. These features will encourage collaboration. One thing I learned a long time ago when I was just starting out in IT is that no one knows everything. Since that time, I have learned that lesson again and again. I may spend eight hours on a script and be really proud of it. When I share my script with another scripter, I will receive feedback very quickly that points toward improvements. This should not be surprising, given the old saying, “Two heads are better than one,” especially when the additional heads are also scripting gurus.
Full disclosure time: There is one significant downside to the new Script Gallery–it is highly addictive! I spent more than eight hours this week playing with the search feature, experimenting with the tag system, and finding all kinds of really cool scripts to examine. I was like a kid in a candy store (okay, more like a fat old man in a candy store, but let’s not get technical). In a word, it is awesome! Check it out.
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