The Lonely Administrator

This question comes up quite often: “How can I encourage adoption of Windows PowerShell in my organization?” I periodically poll people about their adoption plans and what sort of things are standing in the way. Most of the obstacles in my opinion can be cleared with experience, exposure and education. On Twitter today, @ChuckBoyceJr was [...]

I can’t figure out what happened to 2009. Now I have to start looking at 2010 and make plans for what I will be working on. Hopefully some of my projects will be things you are interested in and might even help me pay the bills. Here’s what I have planned, at least for [...]

A challenge many new comers to PowerShell face, especially those arriving with a VBScript background, and one that I often talk about, is shifting gears from working with text to working with objects. Here’s a good example.

If you are thinking about what conferences to attend next year, I hope you’ll consider joining me in Orlando for the Spring TechMentor show. The show runs March 8-12, 2010 in sunny Orlando, FL. This is a great show where you can take away a ton of information that you can put to work immediately. [...]

Way, way back in the day professionals would hang out a painted shingle indicating they were open for business. Even if your literacy skills were lacking you could distinguish between a doctor and an undertaker. Although I think sometimes he did both, but that’s another story.
I thought I should officially hang out my “shingle”. [...]

I was looking at my current Mr. Roboto column “Polish Your Shell” on learning PowerShell by starting with 3 basic commands and noticed a lengthy and serious comment. I’ve always felt PowerShell is easy to use and learn, which was the point of my column. However, the comments paint a different story and one that I feel is more pervasive.

I’m afraid the comment is representative of how PowerShell is perceived by many IT admins. They don’t have time to learn anything new or their hair is constantly on fire (to borrow a favorite Jeffrey Snover phrase). Even though the concepts of cmdlets, parameters and a pipeline seem easy and practically self-apparent, they are not. Especially for an administrator who has never had to open a command window before. Granted GUI-based admin tools might have been cumbersome, but at least you could make some educated guesses about how to use it. A command line is very different.

After a terrific few years at SAPIEN Technologies, I’m back on my own. This site will be my new home. I’ve revamped the title, but I think it more accurately describes my subject matter. Even though I write extensively about scripting and PowerShell, which I’ll continue to do, the topic is really a means to [...]