Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp

The quick start guide for an advanced enterprise PowerShell framework

About This Book

• Introduces industry-proven techniques that improve script efficiency and reliability
• Example-rich guide based on real-world scenarios
• Facilitates building a script that can fully scan a Windows server and identify components

Who This Book Is For

This book is for IT professionals and Windows administrators who would like to gain intensive, hands-on knowledge and skills on PowerShell without spending hours and hours in learning. If you have been struggling to find the time to gain proficiency and confidence with PowerShell and everyday scripting tasks

What You Will Learn

• Create an advanced PowerShell scripting template that provides repeatable code to jumpstart all of your scripting projects
• Learn how to securely encrypt and store usernames, passwords, and other sensitive data in PowerShell scripts and answer files
• Understand how to optimize the performance of scripts to help process large datasets quickly and avoid time-consuming mistakes
• Develop a script to scan for non-standard Windows Server configurations and identify service accounts used on Windows Servers
• Gather a large list of data from a Windows server without locally or remotely logging in interactively

In Detail

Enterprise PowerShell Scripting Bootcamp explains how to create your own repeatable PowerShell scripting framework. This framework contains script logging methodologies, answer file interactions, and string encryption and decryption strategies.

This book focuses on evaluating individual components to identify the system’s function, role, and unique characteristics. To do this, you will leverage built-in CMDlets and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to explore Windows services, Windows processes, Windows features, scheduled tasks, and disk statistics. You will also create custom functions to perform a deep search for specific strings in files and evaluate installed software through executable properties.

We will then discuss different scripting techniques to improve the efficiency of scripts. By leveraging several small changes to your code, you can increase the execution performance by over 130%.

By the end of this book, you will be able to tie all of the concepts together in a PowerShell-based Windows server scanning script. This discovery script will be able to scan a Windows server to identify a multitude of components.

Style and approach

This book is all about fast and intensive learning. This means, we don’t waste time in helping readers get started. The new content is about leveraging highly-effective examples to build new things, help solving problems in newer and unseen ways, and providing an enterprise-ready platform to create PowerShell Scripts.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Enterprise PowerShell Scripting
Chapter 2. Script Structure, Comment Blocks, and Script Logging
Chapter 3. Working with Answer Files
Chapter 4. String Encryption and Decryption
Chapter 5. Interacting with Services, Processes, Profiles, and Logged on Users
Chapter 6. Evaluating Scheduled Tasks
Chapter 7. Determining Disk Statistics
Chapter 8. Windows Features and Installed Software Detection
Chapter 9. File Scanning
Chapter 10. Optimizing Script Execution Speed
Chapter 11. Improving Performance by Using Regular Expressions
Chapter 12. Overall Script Workflow, Termination Files, and Merging Data Results
Chapter 13. Creating the Windows Server Scanning Script and Post-Execution Cleanup