I had my first experience of the UK Powershell Users Group last night, based out of the Microsoft Campus in Reading.

First to speak was James O’Neil who took us through the powershell cmd-lets he had written for managing Hyper-V through powershell which can be downloaded here for free, he went into some very detailed WMI tasks he had written to perform this and some tips and tricks using WMI and mapping the connections using Netmap

At times a little over my head but very useful and clearly a man who now knows WMI inside out !

After the masses of Pizza that was available due to people not turning up we then continued with Jonathan Medd (Creator of Get-Scripting blog and great Podcast) took us through his PowerGUI management tools for Exchange 2003.

Very Impressive, thanks to Jonathan’s neat tool you can now integrate Powershell into managing Exchange 2003 and quickly gain stats and perform admin tasks on Exchange, something which Microsoft have only released for Exchange 2007. Jonathan gave a detailed presentation showing off the features of both PowerGui and his tool he had written.

Until know I have always skipped the PowerGui side of things just to use the script editor to edit my scripts, I may even create my own PowerGui power pack including some of the scripts I use on a daily basis.

All in all it was a great meeting and I suggest more people attend, as well as the great presentations there was also the attendance of Richard Siddaway (MVP) and some other Powershell GURU’s who made for great conversation. We also received some freebies and a random draw gave one of the guys a free Powershell book.

The next one is being scheduled for November and I would highly recommend attending if you can.