Popcorn, Peanuts, and PowerShell

mredwilson

Summary: Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, talks about day two of Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago. When I was a kid, my brother and I could not wait for spring. In fact, during the winter, we carefully perused the schedule…THE schedule of the Cincinnati Reds games at Riverfront Stadium. Every year, our family would take two or three trips to Cincinnati to see the Reds play. It was a great time to be a fan, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Tony Perez, and the rest of the “big red machine.” Of course, we would always pick double-headers, because if you make the trip, you want as much baseball action as possible. The whole point of the trip was to see our idols, and to watch some great baseball action. The crowds were part of the fun, but we certainly did not go for the food or the comfortable seats. In a way, it is sort of like Ignite. Yes, there are 23,000 people here. So there is all the fun of large crowds of people devoted to one great idea—not baseball in this instance, but the idea that computers can make our lives better, and our businesses more agile. Not only that…computers are also fun. Getting to see some of my idols is just part of the fun. It has already been a wonderful week, and it is not even half over. In fact, today is Wednesday. I have not seen any camels around, but I did just hear a tuba (no fooling—it is that kind of event). I was asked yesterday, “What is the most common question you get?” I thought for less than a minute, and replied, “Can I get my picture taken with you?” This made me smile.  Everything else has been totally random. For example, I had a person who was talking about taking data from one system, changing it a bit, and then importing it to another system. Sure, I said, “Wiindows PowerShell can do that. It loves transforming data.” I had another person come by who wantied to automate creating their users, assigning them to groups, and creating file shares. “Yep,” I said, “Windows PowerShell does that too.” Another person stopped by and wanted to know how to automate moving user’s computer accounts to an organizational unit based on their subnet. So, although a normal user account has the rights to join ten computers to the domain, by default those computer accounts end up in the computer’s container. Everyone knows how to modify that so that the computer accounts end up in an organizational unit of choice, but he needed the accounts in specific organizational units based on subnets so he could apply specific GPOs. I thought for a few minutes, and said, “Well, it would be possible to create a script that monitors the organizational unit, and when a new object occurs, trigger an event that moves the computer account. Or it might be less resource intensive to have a scheduled task to do this.” Jason Walker came up with a better idea, “It would be better to modify the image and have a shortcut icon to a script on the desktop. When they double-click the icon, it runs and simply adds the computer account to the appropriate OU. Fewer moving parts,” he said. Yep. fewer moving parts indeed.

~Ed

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