There was, of course, a session, actually several at the MVP Summit about Power Shell and what I was, in particular, involved with, was the Active Directory Provider the MSFT DS team is working towards. At the beginning of the first session I was caught off guard and really had to laugh pretty hard… The design goal according to one of the slides in the PPT deck was… "To make all joe admins… joeware admins…". Basically what they were saying or as I interpreted it was that they wanted to make it so any admin could basically pull off what I pull off in code or otherwise with Active Directory. That was a very nice compliment from the Microsoft folks to me. I mean I have found that the MSFT devs will listen to me and what I have to say but it was very nice to have been told directly like that on a slide. Not really an ego thing, more of a wow, I must be doing something fairly right type thing.
I am not sure how much I can say about the new provider other than they are working on it which I doubt was or is a surprise to anyone anywhere – I mean they had to right? Anyway MVPs are under NDA and I, in particular, am under several NDAs for the various accesses and visibility into the company and I am not willing to risk that. I will say it is a very passionate team working on things who want to try to do the best for the admins to make them flexible and powerful. To be honest I really didn’t see anything that would make me start using PoS but then I am also not the normal product target for that type of product. This doesn’t mean it isn’t good for other people for their various uses. I offered up my services to look over specs and give as much feedback as they are willing to take that will be helpful for the product for its launch. I want them to do an amazing job with it.
Anyway we had one quick brief teaser intro session that was a portion of a larger health/baseline/management session. It was only a few minutes. The next day (Wed) we had a nice 90 minute session which picked up outside on break after the session was over and then eventually picked back up in the main room again between presentations. All total we spent at least a good 3 hours on this new component. It deserves it. This is important stuff. The AD Provider team received a flood of feedback on the product in the course of that three hours and hopefully they will be able to get everything incorporated in the first version. We want to have something that is positively amazing on release or MSFT will find people aren’t using it. We all tried to be very direct about that.
I was in those meetings as well. I thought it was awesome of course 🙂 I think if they achieve their Design goals all who embrace the POWER will be close to joeware admins 🙂
Perhaps one day joe will see the light and convert 🙂 but until then he can provide great software for the rest of us.
PoS? Is that a new acronym for PowerShell or just a Freudian slip? 🙂
Unknown Guy: Yep takes two things, achieving the goal and people embracing it. Hopefully the comments made at the summit will help them with both. As for me… As I mentioned at the summit, if there is something I see there that I absolutely need or I determine I can make a substantial amount of money with it, I will dig into it, in the meanwhile, the draw isn’t there for me. If anything, I may spend some time and build up something to duplicate a lot of the functionality in perl just to show it can be done.
Darren: Yep, PowerShell… PS won’t work, too many things with that. Should have kept the name at Monad.