They say that good things come to those who wait. We have waited, and finally we are now pleased to announce that the book that I’m writing together with my collegaue Niklas Goude (http://www.powershell.nu)will be published by McGraw-Hill and will hit the stores later this year. Exactly when is not yet confirmed but I will make sure you get the information!
The title will be PowerShell for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administrators and will be a book in three parts where the majority of the book is hands on examples on how you use PowerShell to administrate SharePoint 2010. As you probably have heard, SharePoint 2010 is shipped with 500+ PowerShell cmdlets for you as an administrator. And even if STSADM is still available PowerShell is what you need to manage to make life easy further on. Those of you who had the chance to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last year might remember that one of the key things from Microsoft to administrators was -”learn PowerShell!”.
So what we want to do is to go through the fundamentals of SharePoint, PowerShell and then how you combine them to master your SharePoint 2010 environment.
The coming 5 months will be a big adventure for us, it will be fun but mostly it will be many many hours of writing and hard work. Both Niklas and I will blog about the book and how it take shape, but if you are interested in getting the latest updates, sneak peeks of the content and special offers you should sign up for our newsletter. You can register for the newsletter on our web site created specially for the book: www.sharepointandpowershell.com.
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This looks like an exciting undertaking. One of my primary roles at Microsoft is working on the automated scripting of SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell. I work on contract in the group that supports custom portals and farms like MSW and ITWeb and others. PowerShell is proving to be an enormously powerful tool. Our senior developer lead has put a great deal of work into this and has made it possible for us to install a complete SharePoint 2010 installation with maybe 15 minutes of actual hands on interaction with the scripts. I hope you emphasize in your book how to learn and work with the SharePoint object models in a way that is practical for a non-programmer. I think many folks are going to be intimidated by PowerShell because so many books focus on deep programming technique and not enough on the practical quick scripts that comprise most of what is done. You certainly need to know the basic of scripting but many people will get a lot out of working with PowerShell with SharePoint if they just focus on simple quick scripts that get stuff done quickly. And ramp up over time into a deeper skillset involving more extensive scripting using .NET objects and WMI to achive what they want. There is a huge difference between learning basci scripting skills rooted in the fundamentals of programming versus learning development skills which are used for software projects. That is a whole different programming skillset. Learning powershell in my opiion is something that is a skillset which is absolutely mandotory for today’s admins. This is not typically an endeavor that is designed to end up with a page after page of deep code. These are scripts and they speak directly to WMI objects for server work and the SharePoint Object model for SharePoint specific work. Also the Client Object model which is new to 2010 allows us to work on scripts on our local PCs rather than a live server. Of course you have to test it on a live server, sandbox or otherwise. I would like to see someone pick up where Dietel is leaving off with the teaching of PowerShell. They are not working on any PowerShell books at the moment, which is very sad. If someone wrote a PowerShell book in a similar style and color-coded the code in the book like Dietel used to do in all their books that person would have a real winning combination. In terms of learning the SharePoint Object model, I would like to see someone write a loooong chapter with lots of examples to help people not just learn, but internalize the basic and most common objects used starting of course with “SPFarm” and drilling down. We have spend months learning to program SharePoint 2010 with PowerShell and we did it with very little in terms of learning aids. Your books will be a welcome addition. Sorry for the long post.
Keith Caravelli
Level 3 Support, Microsoft SharePoint 2007 and 2010
PowerShell Scripting