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On this week’s show Jeremy Chapman is joined once again by scripting guy, Greg Stemp, to apply PowerShell to practical tasks within Office 365. Greg demonstrates how PowerShell can be used for automating bulk tasks, building advanced queries against data in the service, saving the results to a file for other processes to use and some things you just can’t do in the user interface. If you’ve been putting off learning PowerShell to manage your Office 365 environment, this is part two in a series to help you get started.

 

 

Last week we kicked off a two-part series for using PowerShell to save time in managing Office 365. This week I’m joined again by scripting guru, Greg Stemp, and we apply theory to practice and spend almost the entire show demonstrating common tasks you would need PowerShell for. Specifically we show:

  1. Bulk task automation
  2. Getting information you need with multiple filters or pre-defined reports
  3. Saving queried list or reporting data to a file
  4. Controls not present in the browser-based user interface.

Our demo follows a case where we need to find a set of users with multiple filters – remote project managers – then we save that result to a list to take to our procurement team. Once the procurement team edits the list, we then provision Project Online to against that final list of users. If this sounds like a pretty common scenario, it is and you can save a bunch of time if you have more than a couple of users to query. Saving time is really the point of scripting, and this is no exception.

Finally, we show something that you can only manage in the PowerShell – a detailed list of inactive mailbox owners. There are quite a few things only available via PowerShell controls – like Office 365 Message Encryption settings. But the nice thing is that as the more common PowerShell-only commands surface, the Office 365 engineering team increasingly puts more of these once PowerShell-exclusive controls into the user interface.

To see PowerShell in action and to start learning, you’ll want to check out the show! Next week, the Garage is delivering live shows from TechEd Barcelona. If you’re planning to be at TechEd, stop by and check out a live show!
See you next week!

Jeremy Chapman

More resources

Manage Office 365 with Windows PowerShell (TechNet)

Garage Series Video Channel

Garage Series Season 1 Blog Archive

Follow @OfficeGarage on Twitter

Office 365 Garage Series Apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8

About the Garage Series hosts

By day, Jeremy Chapman works at Microsoft, responsible for optimizing the future of Office client and service delivery as the senior deployment lead. Jeremy’s background in application compatibility, building deployment automation tools and infrastructure reference architectures has been fundamental to the prioritization of new Office enterprise features such as the latest Click-to-Run install. By night, he is a car modding fanatic and serial linguist. Greg Stemp is a Pacific Northwest native and long-time scripting expert who helped establish the Script Center on TechNet. He’s written many of the PowerShell articles and technical documentation on TechNet and is an active speaker and trainer at major technical events and conferences.

powershell2garage 

Source: http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/22/garage-series-office-365-crash-course-powershell-managing-office-365/

Published: 10/23/2014 10:57
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