The Windows PowerShell Command Builder is a new? neat tool for visually build PowerShell commands.
The Silverlight application is designed to help IT professionals and power users to learn how to use PowerShell. It enables IT professionals and power users to visually assemble commands related to SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365 in the browser and take those commands to their respective products.
!!! The beta has ended and PSM is now released onto the Office 365 marketplace. !!!!
!!! Click here to find PSM in the Office 365 marketplace !!!
As some of you might know I have been developing a tool built in InfoPath 2010, yes you read right. InfoPath is that Office program that got installed on your pc that you probably never ever started before, kind of like OneNote, a real hidden gem, unfortunately not so many people uses InfoPath but don’t worry, you only need to have it installed and the tool is being delivered in email to your Outlook client so it will always be near at hands when needed and auto updated as I release updates (so creating a folder and a rule for it in Outlook might be a good idea).
Anyway the tool is a question/form based PowerShell tool, for Lync, Exchange & SharePoint. On-premises or online in the cloud doesn’t matter as I designed it to work both ways. So it’s excellent for Office 365 and since I don’t even have an Exchange server anymore all my development and testing are done with Office 365 for now.
Personally I have found it time consuming and some time troublesome to manage my customers systems in PowerShell as I tend to forget some of the different cmdlts. And I got bored of having to ask my customers the same questions over and over again when setting up policy’s for them, so I first created a form to be filled that generated a PowerShell command as output. I then designed this in a kind of a “flowchart way” to easily and quickly install and set up Lync proof of concepts.
The process is now getting fine tuned and setting up a custom Lync front end for lets say a PoC is now a matter of minutes (minus the installation time of course) but the general config can easily be made in the form and then with the press of a button remote PowerShell configures it all for you.
From there I have developed the tool to now work with Office 365 and Exchange Online. Well Exchange on-premises works as well but only some cmdlets are supported in the beta.
One section is dedicated for Mobile Device Management (via Exchange ActiveSync) and there are options to completely take control of your organizations mobile platform via policy’s pushed out via ActiveSync. Reporting of devices, block devices wipe, devices, etc..
Partner support so that you can manage all your customers from one tool will be in the tool at V1 and when there is support from Microsoft.
User management, domain management well everything is in there, what you can do in PowerShell against Office365 you can do in PSM.
Flowchart based setup of Lync Server, tuned to save time and make an ultimate configuration for your customers. Management and reporting are built in.
My design goals with the V1 are that 100% of Lync and Office365 should be there.
V1.5 will be 100% Exchange and SharePoint
You as an admin will have full control and the commands being run are always visible for your fine tuning and most importantly (at least for me) for training. In a way PSM is also the perfect PowerShell training tool since its all so visible for you to verify before you hit run. I can honestly say that my PowerShell skills has gone from noob to 100 in some weeks of using the tool.
There will be two or more versions and my goals are that the full version should be very affordable and the free version might be ad supported in the future depending on what I want to do with it for V2.
Beta signup can now be made by sending a email to psmsignup@ucaware.com
In this post we are going to look in to how to collaborate in 2010.
The products we are looking at are mainly Word 2010 beta and SharePoint 2010 beta. For presence we are using the good old OCS 2007 R2 and a Communicator 2007 R2 client.
So let’s start with the scenario, Shanti is working on a report/blogpost/document on Windows Phone 7 Series. And he needs my input on the music part of the phone.
So he checks his communicator and sends me an IM asking if I can help him out.
Now we can do two things. Either we can start a desktop sharing session in Communicator 2007 R2 and then he would write and I talk or the other way around. This is great since I can actually see his screen and tell him what to write and where, but it seems that Mr. Shanti have a deadline so we need to hurry up and decides to use a new feature called Co-authoring (i.e. Simultaneous Editing) in Word 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
So the document is stored on a SharePoint 2010 server so it’s just for me to fire a browser up and get to the document site.
Once there I can easily see that there is only one document named anything like Windows Phone 7 series and that it was last edited by Shanti.
If I move my mouse over the status icon I can now interact with Shanti in the good old OCS fashioned way.
If I expand it I will see some more info and the organization view, so I easily can ask his manager if it’s ok that I help him with this.
Well I will just open the document in editing mode
What will happen now is that Shanti, which is already editing the document; will see a pop up that inform him that I am now also editing this document.
If either of us clicks on that icon that just poped up, we will see this
I now start to edit my part which is the music chapter
To protect from two users editing the same part in the document at the same time, Word locks the part you are editing for others and marks that part with a line of dots for you and just a line where the other editor is typing or currently have locks.
So in this demo I (Tommy) just typed in “I love the Zune”
While editing it will also pop up the presence icon so that you easy can contact each other if you need to edit something that the other person currently has locked, “unlocking” is made by a simple save of the document witch will update all your changes to SharePoint and download the changes being made by the other part to your document.
Changes made by the other part will be showed with a green background.
So when Shanti clicked save and updated he can now see my changes with a green background color.