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Back From Asia

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I’m back from a multi week training trip to Asia and Micronesia.  I spent about 3 weeks in both Yokosuka, Japan, and Guam, USA delivering training on Windows 7 and PowerShell.  What I found on my trip was the alarming amount of resistance to automation.  Let me just go on the record of pointing out the amount of automation already built into the Windows Operating systems.  Your client operating systems most likely have some type of scheduled task to defrag the drives.  Look at your patch management or malware updates.  All of this is done through automation.  So where did this resistance come from?

The client worked on a network spanning Europe and Asia.  With over 10,000 seats, they needed help.  When I asked about the use of PowerShell, they were very interested to know more, but were currently not allowed to use it.  The managers wanted all processes to be verified visually.  The last time I checked, not to many people manually access each and ever client to see if this weeks 20+ updates have been applied.  Just to give you an idea of how long that would take, lets say it takes 2 minutes remote in, check the installed patches, and then log off.  That would require about 330 hours of none stop work to verify those updates.  In other words, you would not be able to finish all those checks before the next set of updates arrived.  More then likely, they are using an automated processes.

With PowerShell, you can tell PowerShell to read the feedback.  It could be what is acceptable in a string or integer value.  It could be a return code.  Maybe the remaining storage capacity or current network utilization.  What ever value your people are looking at, you can script for it.  Think about it.  If your people had to run a process manually 10,000 times and then check a value (or more) what is the probability of error?  I would say 100%.  With automation, you can be sure that the job will both get done and be reported properly.

A key to this is learning PowerShell properly.  I get a lot of requests for help from people who have been struggling for months to try to learn a concept in PowerShell,  Most likely after a week of PowerShell training, you will be able to better understand how to approach your task and how to code for it properly.  Please feel free to contact me and I will let you know when my next publically available PowerShell class is. 

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