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As promised, I'm back with a second article from the PowerShell series, but this time,
with a pleasant novelty, PowerGui.
Although I am fully well aware that it's not too popular in the System world. I consider
myself to be a GUI person - that's the way I am. I was raised on the purity of Windows,
starting from the 95 version, and have been hooked ever since.
It is great to see that there is a tool that lets us work with PowerShell’s capabilities
through a graphic user interface.
Since PowerGui is based on PowerShell, I would advise anyone who isn’t familiar
with the PowerShell to review my previous article on this subject.
I have been asked quite a lot in lectures that I have conveyed about PowerShell and
PowerGui why a graphic interface should be used to execute commands.
The answer is ease of operation, issue of reports and writing of scripts that can be saved,
cataloged, run and modified easily.
PowerGui is a tool that enables running of commands and scripts on objects and get
results to the management interface.
This is what the tool looks like, in the best MMC V3.0 tradition, on the left of the
navigation tree, in the middle of the working area and the right of the action pane,
it is like every Microsoft product since 2005.
Now that we’ve met the tool, let’s see its capabilities starting with basic actions,
such as checking a certain user for membership of a group. In this case,
all we need to do is choose the user:
Click Member of Under Links on the right:
This provides the list of groups that the user is a member of:
This was the warm-up task, now the major task of PowerGui is in difficult,
complicated tasks such as group nesting queries.
To get the information, we perform the same actions, but choose
Member of (Recursive) instead of Member of
The output is as follows:
Pay attention to the differences between the two outputs.
For dessert, we could of course export the information to a file in one of the
three formats at the bottom of the Action pane.
After learning the basic capabilities of the tool, let's see its flexibility.
A simple action such as right clicking an object and Properties can be
used to select an endless range of Cmdlets, which are built-in commands of
PowerShell that are assigned to that object, thus expanding the range of actions
that we can apply to that object.
In addition, we can easily edit, copy and add lines to built-in scripts by clicking a command
in the Action pane and selecting Properties
From here, anyone, in accordance with their needs in the organization, can use the built-in
capabilities of the tool or add objects, scripts and so on.
If this article you want to try PowerGui out, you can download the tool and its expansions
from the links below:
http://www.powergui.org/index.jspa
http://www.quest.com/powershell/powergui.aspx
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