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Read-Only Friday March 10, 2023

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It’s Friday, and I’m going to keep this one short in sweet copy. I’ve mentioned this module before, but it is so helpful if you use any of the products, that I want to make sure you don’t miss out on it! Yes, I know it’s Read-Only Friday, but this module will step up your documentation game ten fold.

AsBuiltReport on Github or you can find them on asbuiltreport.com.

What they have created is multiple modules depending on the product you need documentation on, and with one quick line of code, you get a full breakdown of the product you requesting information on. How about a 144 page document on your Active Directory? Not bad, right?

Check them out, and let me know what you think!

GitHub:
https://github.com/AsBuiltReport

Website:
https://www.asbuiltreport.com/

Module Monday January 30, 2023

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We are back, and hope you had a great weekend! Today’s module is one Jeff Hicks had told me about last week and I started playing with it. It’s a neat module that makes managing your tasks easy. His module is called PSWorkItem.

It allows you to create predefined categories with a description, that you can add your tasks too. You can even set the default category so that you don’t have to keep on typing the category name for each task for your primary category. The categories can highlighted in the color of your choosing if you need that feature. Another great feature is that you can input due dates and view tasks by a numnber of different filters. There is an option to put percentage complete which can be very useful if you have certain milestones for your code, and once you reach it you could have it automatically update PSWorkItem for you.

If you are looking for a simple task list that gets the job done, I highly recommend this, especially since you can easily integrate it into your coding. I know there are other ways, but you could even create a template of tasks that need to be completed for a project, then link that project so that after each task is run successfully, it automatically completes it for you.

I know Jeff has a future task of making it so you can use it with a WPF or TUI, but I’d also love to see it integrated with PowerShell Universal.

GitHub:
PSWorkItem

Module Monday January 23, 2023

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It’s already the 4th Monday in January, can you believe it? At least that means we get an extra Module Monday next week, but lets stick to this one for right now!

Enjoy Markdown, and want to generate markdown help for your existing module, or create markdown help for modules you are currently working on? PlatyPS is the module you need.

Supported scenarios:

  • Create Markdown
    • Using existing external help files (MAML schema, XML).
    • Using reflection
    • Using reflection and existing internal external help files.
    • For a single cmdlet
    • For an entire module
  • Update existing Markdown through reflection.
  • Create a module page .md with summary. It will also allow you to create updatable help cab.
  • Retrieve markdown metadata from markdown file.
  • Create external help xml files (MAML) from platyPS Markdown.
  • Create external help file cab
  • Preview help from generated maml file.

If any of that looks to be useful, definitely check out PlatyPS!

Github:
PlatyPS

Read-Only Friday November 18, 2022

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It’s coming to the end of the year and only a handful more ROF for this year, which can also mean agreements and renewals for a lot of people. How do you manage them? Do you have dedicated software, excel, sharepoint, SQL, or something else?

Do you have any automation built in for reminders to bring up to management, reminders for yourself, and/or request quotes from vendors? And yes I said for yourself, who enjoys renewing software then realizing you didn’t put in the new license and everything stops..

Going a little deeper, what about  cost wise? Do you have it so you can see upcoming costs and expected costs for the year. I know not all organizations are lucky enough to have enterprise grade software and/or dedicated departments to manage all of this. For smaller organizations, it can easily start out as an excel/sharepoint/google sheet and grow into local/cloud SQL or other scaleable solution. If you start now though, you’ll know what you want and don’t want which will make selecting solutions much easier. And from my years in the industry I can tell you that even with enterprise grade software you will still need to do some custom integrations, just a lot less of them.

Read-Only Friday October 28, 2022

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It’s Friday and the day for no major unplanned changes to your infrastructure.

How does your team share documentation between each other? Is it all in GitHub, Teams, Sharepoint, OneNote, Notion, ConnectWise, BookStack, etc? Or is it simple as word docs on a network share? Would you recommend the current way you are doing it?

If you use a combination, I’d love to hear the process of how you have it setup. If you prefer, you can message me, and I’ll do a summary of what everyone is using.

I know I have friends in all different size companies, curious to see how some of the solutions scale.

Module Monday October 24, 2022

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It’s Module Monday…

Although this module could be on Read-Only Friday, I wanted to show you that not all modules change your environment, and they can be extremely helpful getting information for you so you don’t have to create it or yourself. And with it being Cyber Security Month, why not have an easy way to find changes in your Active Directory.

With that said, today’s module is Jeff Hicks ADReportingTools, which I think the name is pretty obvious of what it does, but definitely check out the GitHub for all the reporting it can do. Here are a few of my favorites.

  • Get-ADDomainControllerHealth – this checks storage space, physical memory, % of security log in use, and critical services not running
  • Get-ADUserAudit – which will search the event logs on your domain controller for that specific user events
  • Get-ADGroupUser – which will display all users in that defined group and who any disabled users in red
  • Get-ADSiteSummary – shows a quick view of your sites and subnets
  • Show-DomainTree – this will show your domain in a tree view in your console
  • New-ADDomainReport – I really like this one, it shows you a nice html formatted report of your domain

Hope you take a look at it and if you see any features you’d like, let Jeff know.

PowerShell Gallery:

ADReportingTools/1.4.0

GitHub:
ADReportingTools