TNWiki Article Spotlight – Windows PowerShell Survival Guide
This week’s spotlight is the Windows PowerShell Survival Guide. This wiki article is one of 40+ as of this writing that use the naming convention “survival guide” on the TNWiki.
At customer events a few years ago we started handing out these one-page "Survival Guides" (printed both sides and laminated) with links to important resources. The wiki versions of the Survival Guides are meant to do the same things without killing trees or using laminating machines. The name just kinda stuck from that time. The guides are not restricted to just “survival”” as in “strictly troubleshooting – break/fix” information.
As of this writing the Windows PowerShell Survival Guide has been revised over 300 times, and has been successful as measured by a number of metrics:
- Contributors: 49 (mostly non-Microsofties)
- Contributions: 324
- Version 1 word count: 228
- Current Version (#325) word count: 2998
User comments are favorable and indicate that we are achieving one of our objectives, which was to give the “all up” view of PowerShell resources on the web for IT Pros/Devs. IT provides a one-stop page with RSS feed of all different types of PowerShell content, including blogs, videos, books, training courses and sites, twitter accounts, sample scripts, conceptual content, how-to content, and so on. TechNet and MSDN usually provide this content in silos, usually by content type. Highly useful for folks new to PowerShell.
I find the RSS Feed for the PowerShell Survival Guide handy, but we don’t currently have numbers on how many folks use it. Do you? Is it useful? Leave comments, let us know.
The article is the first choice on both Bing and Google search results pages for the search phrase “PowerShell Survival Guide.” Discoverability is a key metric of success for content.
This page also includes content contributed in non-English languages, which we never get together with English-language links on TN or MSDN pages.
One of the great features for technical content of the TN Wiki is the History tab. This allows you to use the Compare Versions button to compare any two revisions of the article and quickly see *what changed?* Additions are highlighted in green, deletions in red.
Based on a user suggestion, here is the Mobi-tag for the guide:
Contributing to a big linkspage like this is easy, all you have to prepare is the link you want to share.
Want to join in the fun? Share your troubleshooting expertise or favorite list of links? Come on in the wiki is fine: