Over the past few months I have been spending more and more time working with PowerShell. I have gone to Windows 8 on my personal laptop, and am impressed by PowerShell 3.0. I have joined the Charlotte PowerShell User’s Group which meets monthly at the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. The Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, together with his Teresa are regular attendees of the meetings, and at last month’s meeting I won a signed copy of Ed’s latest book, PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step. I shared some struggles I was having with PowerShell, and Ed gave me some practical advice about how to proceed. It was something I already knew — focus on a real world problem and don’t be concerned about writing elegant code.
For some time, I have been getting traffic for my GPO Reporter HTA. Unfortunately, this requires a component that was last available in Windows XP. I quit using XP (even VMs) last month, and the loss of the GPO Reporter soon became a problem. Fortunately, this month’s POSH meeting was led by Microsoft PFE Jason Walker who covered Active Directory and PowerShell. I decided to take another look at a PowerShell GPO Reporter.
I think I have done some interesting things in the coding of the new script, GPOReports.ps1, but it is hard to tell as I am still a PowerShell beginner. I have commented the code to make things easier to understand. This script requires PowerShell 3. Also note that you will need to install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) to get this to work, as it provides the ActiveDirectory PowerShell Module. It is available for Windows 7 and Windows 8. This is unsigned code, if you are a PowerShell noob, take a look at execution policy explanations about how to get it to run.