ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 12-October-2018
Topics include the Switch statement, Chocolatey Fest, Graph API, HTML disk reports, auditing Office 365 document sharing and Teams usage.
Special thanks to Mark Roloff for his creative writing and Robin Dadswell for content curation!
PowerShell Switch
by Stephanos Constantinou on October 8th
There are times when we’ve got a large number of conditions to check against and having more than a few if statements gets pretty ugly real fast. Enter the switch statement. Stephanos has written a nice rundown of how to use it when evaluating lots of conditions, as well as some of its more advanced features.
My Chocolateyfest (WinOps) Conference Experience
by Dan Franciscus on October 9th
In a more community-meta post, Dan shares his thoughts after attending this year’s Chocolatey Fest; that’s a conference broadly focused around everything Windows automation. I didn’t know much about the event before, but Dan’s candid perspective of the experience has convinced me to mark my calendar for hopefully attending next year.
Getting started with Graph API and PowerShell
by Alexander Holmeset on October 10th
We love playing with cool new APIs, and while the Graph API isn’t exactly new, to a lot of people it probably is. It can also open the door to a lot of cross-service automation for those of us working in the Azure/O365 world. Alexander has published a great introduction to Graph, how to explore it, and how to get started using it in your PowerShell scripts.
Creating Colorful HTML Disk Reports with PowerShell
by Jeffrey Hicks on October 11th
One of the best ways to expand your scripting knowledge is to read someone else’s work. Jeff has offered an opportunity to do that right here. In this post, he found an old script, and decided to dust it off and add some new features to it. The result is a clean and professional looking HTML report.
A quick start guide for powershell I made for work
There doesn’t seem to ever be any real shortage of newcomers to PowerShell, so it’s no surprise that new beginner material is always popping up. Reddit user /u/tamtt has thrown together a pretty nice guide to getting started, with quick explanations and examples of many foundational concepts.
Tweet of the Week
Stepping back from highlighting just popular media for a moment, we felt that this interaction served as a nice reminder of how accessible help in the community is. One of our team members also got burned by this error in a PowerShell module, but the maintainers were able to point to a quick and easy solution.
Youtube: Getting Stuff Done: Solving Office 365 Problems with PowerShell
This 20-minute session from Ignite covers a number of useful tips around auditing document sharing, Teams usage, and license management. Topics include using the Office 365 audit log to discover who’s creating new Office 365 Groups, analyzing document sharing habits, understanding guest user activity, investigating Teams compliance, managing license features, and finding pwned mailboxes.
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PowerShell Escape Room
PowerShell Escape Room by Michiel Hamers
by Michiel Hamers
https://about.me/michielhamers/
Why on earth you want to create an Escape Room with PowerShell as backend?
I’ve always been a fan of escape rooms, so I decided to create my own for my kids. I wanted to make it something that would be challenging and fun for them, but also educational. I decided to use PowerShell as the backend for the escape room, as I’m a PowerShell developer and I thought it would be a great way to learn more about the language.
The first step was to design the rooms. I wanted to make sure that there were a variety of puzzles and challenges that my kids would have to solve. I also wanted to make sure that the rooms were visually appealing and engaging. Once I had the rooms designed, I started building them.
I used a variety of materials to build the rooms, including wood, cardboard, and fabric. I also used a few electronic components, such as a USB extension cable with a switch and a 3-button keyboard. The USB extension cable with a switch was used to create a physical button that my kids could press to solve one of the puzzles. The 3-button keyboard was used to enter the code that my kids had to find to solve another puzzle.
I also used a few websites to create rebus puzzles that my kids had to solve. I printed out the rebus puzzles and placed them around the rooms. Once my kids had solved all of the puzzles, they were able to enter the code on a single screen to escape the room.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into the process of creating an engaging PowerShell escape room for the global PowerShell community. We’ll emphasize the significance of storytelling and provide a detailed breakdown of the PowerShell structure used for the escape room.
Microsoft Graph PowerShell Module: Getting Started Guide
Microsoft Graph PowerShell Module: Getting Started Guide
by Jeff Brown
Microsoft is retiring the Azure AD Graph API sometime after June 30, 2023 (announcement). This retirement includes the Azure AD PowerShell module. In its place, Microsoft has released the Microsoft Graph PowerShell module. The Microsoft Graph PowerShell module is the next-generation way of managing Microsoft cloud services using PowerShell. If you have used MSOnline or Azure AD PowerShell in the past, you’ll need to read on to learn about this new module.
ICYMI: PowerShell Week of 08-October-2021
Topics include VMWare, Windows 11, Web Reports and more…
Special thanks to Robin Dadswell, Prasoon Karunan V, Kiran Patnayakuni and Kevin Laux
How to gather your vCenter inventory data with this VMware PowerShell script
by Scott Matteson on 7th October
Inventory reports are a common request when administering a VMware vCenter environment. Learn how this VMware PowerShell script can make such requests quick and easy
Building a Web Report in PowerShell, use the -Force Luke
by Chris Noring on 8th October