The folks at Microsoft have made it pretty clear that they regard PowerShell (the scripting language formerly known as “monad”) as the future for managing their server products. Exchange 2007 was just the first wave, with the latest versions of SharePoint and SQL quickly following suite.  When Windows Server 2008 R2 is released, it will be accompanied by PowerShell v2.0, which will include a whole new batch of AD management cmdlets (including one for un-deleting AD objects – yeah!), as well as a PSDrive provider which will allow the Active Directory to be accessed from PowerShell as if it were a filesystem.

Last week, I and several of my collegues had the good fortune to attend a PowerShell training class.  Although I’ve been using PowerShell now for over a year to manage Exchange 2007, the class did provide a good opportunity to bone up on the fundamentals, and even helped me clear up some misconceptions that I had about how certain commands work. (ForEach and ForEach-Object are different commands?  That explains a lot….)

For anyone interested in learning more about PowerShell, here are some good resources:

• http://www.microsoft.com/powershell
  
• http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell
• http://blogs.technet.com/benp (a blog by one of our instructor’s colleagues)
• http://blogs.msdn.com/adpowershell (gives sneak peeks at upcoming R2 functionality)
• http://jazzynupe.net/blog (the personal blog maintained by our instructor)
• http://blogs.msdn.com/askds  (not really related to PowerShell, but good AD info – came up on the Hi-Ed list last week)
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb905330.aspx (MSDN PowerShell documentation)
• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/winpsh/manual/default.mspx
• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
• http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/default.mspx?mfr=true (sample PowerShell scripts)