Comments on: PowerShell Production Poll

By: cmcknz77

cmcknz77 — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 07:53:46 +0000

I’m the only member of our IT Staff currently who is using it in Production. None of the others worldwide in the corporation are even using it for testing purposes.
Essentially this is because of the security issues with regards to codesigning on a Windows2000 domain and a lack of understanding by the IT management of the necessity for preparing for the use of a technology before it comes “installed by default”.

Personally I’m still learning it, but I spend as much time in it as I can on a daily basis and am using (and I must say loving) the new Remoting tools…

By: PowerShell Poll | The Lonely Administrator

PowerShell Poll | The Lonely Administrator — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:17:56 +0000

[...] why? Inquiring minds at SAPIEN want to know. Take a moment to answer a simple yes/no poll at http://blog.sapien.com/index.php/2008/09/23/powershell-production-poll/. If you aren’t using PowerShell, kindly leave a comment explaining why. Nobody’s [...]

By: francisco

francisco — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:45:37 +0000

We don’t use powershell because we have a lot of win2k servers working in our infraestructure and powershell is not compatible with it.

At end with vbscript and .cmd scripts are enought for our requeriments now.

sorry for my terrible english.

By: Jeffery Hicks

Jeffery Hicks — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:03:30 +0000

There is AD support coming from Microsoft for PowerShell, although it will require Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. Although the free Quest Powershell cmdlets are an excellent alternative and work with what you have today.

By: Simon

Simon — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:54:46 +0000

One of the things that put me off was the threat of v2 and the big changes between the two. I’ve been using C# since .Net 1.1 and it’s grown a lot – I’m still not familiar with all of the 2.0 stuff, let alone, 3.0, 3.5 and 3.5 SP1 – I think the C# team have acknowledged that they’re developing it too quickly for commercial programmers to keep up – we have to justify time spent on training in terms of return. Before I even got started with PoSh v1, I knew v2 was coming and there would be big changes.
Another is that I know both VBScript and C#, and PowerShell is very different from both so yet another paradigm to be learnt. From where I am, it looks like the north face of the Eiger – horribly and frighteningly steep. None of the introductory material has really coped with that, to me.
The final difference was is the abysmal support for AD. Dropping into native .NET is just unnacceptable. Frankly, the native .NET stuff from C# is rubbish – I’d written my own helper classes to make it nicer. If PowerShell had done AD properly, I’d probably have persevered with it because most of my scripts are used to manipulate AD. We have SMS to manage machines and software, Ops Manager to manage the operational side but we don’t have anything for AD.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:28:15 +0000

We are planning to begin using in our Windows 2008 server ventures, but for now the overhead of migrating to ps would not be cost effective.

As I see it here are my pros and cons of powershell.

Pros
1. Free!
2. Consistency
3. Expanded feature set
4. Improvement upon WSH
5. .NET integration
6. Export operations to PS code from applications (like exchange and sccm)
7. Flexibility as scripting or shell.

Cons
1. Terrible native tools. I’ve already purchased commerical admin scripting tools that still are better than vbs or powershell. What is the value add of buying (and not saying bad) a commercial tool like Sapien to replace what already works for me.
2.Hideous language syntax for admins. Moving from a procedural command driven mindset to a more object oriented and verb noun . notation is confusing. C# style was probably not the best idea. Python might’ve worked better (IronPython anyone?)
3. Lacks maturity at this time. This includes things like integrated libraries for easier functions. There are other products which do this rather nicely and integrate them to make the whole package easy. CMDLets are nice, but what value add does give me over functions from includes? None really. Third party offerings are nice, but when core functionality is still missing from the native package and the integration is lacking I tend to cringe.
4.Requires deployment. Would be nice if they could be complied with a mini byte-code runtime embeded into the script until PS becomes a standard in Windows.
5.This is more of a gripe, but there are far too many powershell resources out there and none of them reall consolidate everything I’d want into a single website.
6.Help files really need help. I’m used to higher quality help files, so perhaps I am biased here. Better examples and descriptions!!!

All in all it’s a murky offering. I see it’s potential as it matures, but I’ll stick with what works where I can and use it only when forced.

By: Sapien PowerShell poll - get-powershellblog

Sapien PowerShell poll - get-powershellblog — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:50:21 +0000

[...] PowerShell poll Check it out HERE. Very interesting comments. I do agree with the resistance with putting .NET on production systems. [...]

By: Jeffery Hicks

Jeffery Hicks — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:55:36 +0000

Andrew, if you are already batch/cli oriented then you will love PowerShell once you can get your hands on it.

By: Jeffery Hicks

Jeffery Hicks — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:53:09 +0000

I totally agree about how difficult it can be today to deploy PowerShell and it is certainly not the right tool for all jobs. But as i said earlier, you only need to deploy it where you are going to run scripts or want to use it interactively. Also be sure you don’t think of PowerShell has merely a scripting language. It is also a powerful interactive management shell. The fact that you can automate a PowerShell session into a script is icing.

By: Andrew from Vancouver

Andrew from Vancouver — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:52:28 +0000

What Jeffrey said… I’m in the Catch-22. The refinements on my scenario are that we have only installed .NET on servers where required (as we implement W2K3 and W2K7 this issue is going away), and that my language of choice has been batch, augmented with Win32 GNU tools and the PS Tools from SysInternals (now Microsoft).