The User Group held its first meeting last night (24 January) at Global Knowledge in Wokingham. Many thanks to Global Knowledge for the venue and to Thomas Lee for organising the pizza and beer. The pizza was warm and the beer was cold. Maybe that should become the group motto!
A total of 14 people braved the cold of a January night and the intricacies of Wokingham’s roads for the meeting. Given that it was the first meeting of a brand new group I thought it was a good turn out and I’d like to thank everyone who turned up both for being there and for the participation in the meeting.
I opened the meeting with a quick rundown of the group, how it came about – thanks Eileen – and how I thought the group would develop. I also proved to one and all that my sense of humour may not be the most refined in the world. No one who was there will be able to here the phrase “PowerShell Rocks” ever again without shuddering. I promise to be good and not repeat that performance. If something else comes to mind though……………..
Interestingly there were two people who classed themselves as developers, about 9 administrators and the rest of us either do some of both or the don’t do either full time but are interested in PowerShell. One interesting comment was that a lot of the current documentation was aimed at developers and that many of the major PowerShell blogs are developer orientated. The user group will look to cover both areas but is bound to concentrate on the area most heavily represented by the members.
Thomas Lee talked about the installation and configuration of PowerShell. At this point the meeting began to develop as people were contributing and joining in the discussion. This made it feel like a group meeting rather than a presentation. Mid-way through this session the pizza arrived so we concentrated on the important things and demolished the pizza.
After the pizza we finished the installation and configuration we moved on to looking at PowerGadgets which was quite fitting as Thomas had arranged for some memory sticks containing a trial copy of PowerGadgets amongst other things. The extra impact that is achieved by having a graphical display of the output of PowerShell cmdlets is enormous. It is very simple to use and from the discussion the range of possible uses is huge. I can see a lot of experimentation happening in the near future! We wrapped up and headed home after talking about the next meeting.
The subject of using Live Meeting was covered and that is something we definitely will be looking at organising.
During the discussion on configuration the possibility of setting a function in one profile and preventing it being redefined in a profile applied later in the sequence was discussed. We will be exploring that in the PowerShell forums.
We will be creating an area on the PowerShell website for the posting of profiles or functions that you define in your profile. Many functions that are used in profiles are very short and do not warrant posting as a script. By creating this area we can collect the most useful profile functions and share them across the membership. Please contribute. One function per member and we have a valuable resource for the PowerShell community.
Next meeting will be in March at Microsoft, Thames Valley Park, Reading. Date to be confirmed. Subjects will be Administering Active Directory with PowerShell and Administering Sharepoint with PowerShell.
The meeting after that we may well have a session on how to start using the .Net framework with PowerShell. More to follow.
It has been a long wait for me since we first started to form a User Group back in November. With the snow this morning I was quite concerned as to the turn out we would get. The first meeting of any group can be awkward but I was very pleasantly surprised by the way the level of participation and the willingness to share. Thanks guys you made the effort worthwhile and hope to see you in March.
