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How ChatGPT saved our company $1500 in less than 15 minutes

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Let me set the stage… previously we had a batch file in our startup script to add/remove network drives. It worked great and didn’t have any issues. We moved away from an on-site file server to a cloud solution with local cache. They created a new batch file for us which worked perfectly… until we started looking at integrating Intune computers. Luckily, early on we caught this, and realized we needed a PowerShell script instead of a batch script. We reached out to the vendor with knowing they had PowerShell experience and asked if they could recreate the script using PowerShell. They came back with a quote of $1,500.

I looked at the batch script again, and said there is no way it costs that much to convert an already working batch script to PowerShell. So what did I do? I opened up the 26 line batch script, skimmed over it, then copied it into ChatGPT, and told it to convert the script to PowerShell. It created a PowerShell function within the script and when I followed up with an additional prompt to see if a certain drive was still present to delete it, it created that as well. It was 98% done, I only had to fill in our company data and one part they had an additional parameter that wasn’t needed. All less than 15 minutes. For context, this was with ChatGPT with GPT-4 back in early May 2023, as it is even better now.

Is ChatGPT always this accurate? No, but when you search on Google, Stack Overflow, or any other site, is it always accurate? I like to think of ChatGPT, Azure OpenAI, etc as a smart intern where you trust, but verify the work before implementing. Always test in a development environment as some code take down infrastructure(Same with other sites/LLMs)

Now, not only did I save the company $1,500, I saved time from all the meetings, paperwork(Purchase Order and misc), and testing with the vendor which I used to work on other projects!

Hope you found this helpful and gets you thinking of using ChatGPT, Azure OpenAI, etc more, but please make sure you know what you are testing and/or are in a complete test environment. And if for some reason you take down something in production by accident, let someone know asap what you were doing, so that it can be quickly resolved if you aren’t sure how to fix it.

Read-Only Friday 365 Developer Program

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Want to have some fun with Office 365, but don’t want to mess up your production environment? Or what about being able to try out scripts and not having to brace yourself as you run them and hope they don’t clear out all your data? Now you can do whatever you want with the Microsoft 365 Dev Center.

That is right, up to 25 E5 licensed users at your disposal for 90 days and will be renewed as long as you are using it. They will even create 16 users for you, mail traffic, and more. This isn’t just for PowerShell, this all aspects of 365.

Awesome, right? Here are few examples:

  1. You could copy up to 25 of your current users and import them into this Developer tenant and test scripts see exactly how it would work with your information. Think of those times where you test a script with fictional users and your script works perfect, but once you put it into production, your script fails because one username had a character that your test data didn’t have. Now your spending unnecessary time trying to figure out what went wrong when it worked perfectly in proof of concept.
  2. You want to test new features or policies, but you don’t want to enable them in your production environment, as your not 100% sure how it will react to your environment. Configure this test environment how your current tenant is then enable those features or policies you want to test. Much safer to test in the dev environment, then do it in production and all of a sudden your users can’t access critical resources or anything at all!
  3. Your boss wants you do a proof of concept on how to streamline the onboarding process and to make it as simple as possible for the organization. It is recommended that you use Sharepoint and Teams as the company already uses both and are familiar. Instead of using your production environment, you can do this all in the dev tenant without affecting anything in production. You can even invite key players in this project to login and test it with you. Now you don’t have to worry about a teams alert that you setup for when a new hire has been added to AD or Microsoft Entra ID spamming a your production channel because your script or flow errored.

These are just a few scenarios that the 365 Dev tenant can be useful, but there are so many more. I’m barely scratching the surface, and hope you sign up right away for this if you haven’t already. It is free, if you administer or develop 365, you need this.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out in anyway I can.

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Dev Center

Module Monday February 20, 2023

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Hope you had a great weekend! And since the weekend is over, it’s now time for Module Monday. We have a great one today that I feel you will see immediate ROI from using it.

uGit by James Brundage is a PowerShell module that provides users with a simplified interface to interact with Git repositories. It includes a set of functions that can be used to perform various Git-related tasks, such as cloning repositories, committing changes, pushing and pulling changes, and creating branches, among others. Here are some of the key features of uGit:

Simple and Easy to Use

uGit provides users with a simplified interface to interact with Git repositories. The module’s functions are easy to use and don’t require users to have extensive knowledge of Git commands. With uGit, users can automate their Git workflows with just a few lines of PowerShell code.

Git Repository Management

uGit includes functions for managing Git repositories, such as cloning, creating, and deleting repositories. The module also provides users with the ability to switch between repositories and set a default repository for their Git workflow.

Committing and Pushing Changes

With uGit, users can easily commit and push changes to their Git repositories. The module includes functions for adding and removing files from the staging area, committing changes, and pushing changes to the remote repository.

Branch Management

uGit includes functions for creating and deleting Git branches, as well as switching between branches. The module also provides users with the ability to merge branches and resolve merge conflicts.

Git Configurations

uGit provides users with the ability to set and manage their Git configurations, such as user name and email, Git editor, and Git credentials.

In conclusion, uGit users can automate their Git workflows and perform complex Git-related tasks with ease. If you’re a PowerShell user looking to integrate Git functionalities into your workflows, uGit is definitely worth checking out.

Github:
uGit

PowerShell Gallery:
uGit 0.3.6

One-Liner Wednesday February 15, 2023

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I’m just going to cut to the chase on this one..

 copilot "How to filter ID column not being empty and if it isn't empty it starts with a number and the other column named sideindicator having a r in it using powershell and importexcel and both criteria must be true?"
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║Q: How to filter ID column not being empty and if it isn't empty it starts with a number and the other column named sideindicator having a r in it using powershell and importexcel and both criteria must be true?  ║
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║1: $data = Import-Excel -Path "C:\Path\To\File.xlsx"                                                                                                                                                                 ║
║2: $data | Where-Object {$_.ID -and $_.ID -match '^\d' -and $_.SideIndicator -eq 'r'}                                                                                                                                ║
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How about that? Nice little RegEx in there too! Yes this does work, as I used it this morning for a real life solution.

Download Doug Finke’s PowerShellAI module, get your OpenAI API key, and start having some fun! And if for some reason you still haven’t downloaded his ImportExcel module get that too! And want to hear a little more about Doug, check him out on the PowerShell Podcast and find out how ImportExcel is created.

That’s enough for today, I don’t want to take away your time from playing with this!

PowerShell Gallery:
PowerShellAI

GitHub:
PowerShellAI

One-Liner Wednesday January 11, 2023

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It’s Wednesday already, is that good or bad for you? Hoping it’s a good thing, and hoping todays one-liner makes it even better.

$Path = $env:TEMP; $Installer = 'chrome_installer.exe'; Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/375.126/chrome_installer.exe' -OutFile $Path\$Installer; Start-Process -FilePath $Path\$Installer -Args '/silent /install' -Verb RunAs -Wait; Remove-Item -Path $Path\$Installer

What this one-liner will do is go out and fetch chrome and silently install or update it. Then it will delete the installer after it has been installed. You could add lines for logging in case you had other software that you wanted to install after, but I feel this is a great foundation if you’ve never done it before. If you start adding logging and other features(ie. confirming it has installed), I’d definitely take it out of the one-liner format for ease of reading/troubleshooting unless for some reason you need to keep it as a one-liner.

You can do this with many applications, you just have to make sure the URI and switches(Args) are correct.