The simple reason

Recognising that PowerShell may be too complex and powerful for some, Quest Software has come up with PowerGUI, a self-explanatory tool for those who prefer to bypass the dreaded command prompt

I recently attended a seminar by that well-known exponent of Active Directory John Craddock (www.XTSeminars.co.uk). While I was there I got chatting to Joe Baguley, the European CTO for Quest. The subject got onto what was wrong with the world in general – and specifically with Exchange 2007 and Active Directory. The controversial subject of PowerShell cropped up, and out of the blue Joe said, "You know about PowerGUI don't you?"

In this business, the world revolves around the latest technology, and it is easy to get undermined by folk "in the know" dropping the odd buzzword into the conversation. "Er, no," I replied, feeling a little uninformed. "What is it?" Was it, perhaps, some new form of epoxy glue, or a caffeine-laced energy drink? Joe explained that it's the ultimate answer if you want to avoid the dreaded command prompt in PowerShell – and it's free. Being naturally tight with the cash, my ears pricked up at this news.

Easy does it
Joe went on to explain that Quest recognised that PowerShell was possibly not the answer to the prayers of your average mid-sized company's IT department. I have always thought that Mr Jack-of-all-trades IT megastar in these organisations just does not have the time to learn thousands of (albeit immensely powerful) commands. What is needed is a self-explanatory GUI that leads our struggling Exchange administrator through the steps without clogging up his or her brain with over-complicated instructions. Ironically the GUI-based System Administrator for Exchange 2007 prepares the scripts for PowerShell, which can be saved and reused at a later time; the problem is that it only does the very simple things.

So Quest went about putting together PowerGUI and then decided to make it freely available. Significantly, the web site is a ".org" and not a ".com". The cynical side of me wonders why Quest is giving it away. I appreciate that this is a great way of getting some market penetration for a new product, maybe a suite of products, but where is the profit?

To investigate PowerGUI, my first port of call was the web site, www.PowerGUI.org. From there I downloaded the 3.5MB zipped installer file. After a simple installation I fired up the program itself. The Management Console has a hierarchy tree, a results pane and an actions pane. Working from the left, in the hierarchy tree we have Local System, and under Exchange 2007 we have Active Directory, Recipients, Servers and the ubiquitous Public Folders. The other two panes change depending on what's being displayed in the first left-hand pane, but it is all straightforward.



Figure 1: The PowerGUI main interface looks similar to Exchange System Manager's

The pane train
One interesting feature is that the centre pane has two tabs, the UI tab and the PowerShell Code tab. Switching across from the default UI tab to PowerShell code shows the commands required to manage the objects listed in the UI. The commands can be copied, saved and reused as and when. I also noticed a Filter button allowing you to ensure the displayed selection is only those items you require. The Actions pane has three subsections: Links, Actions and Actions Common. The contents of these three are completely dynamic and will depend on where the focus is in the other two panes. For example, if you have the focus on Recipient Mailboxes, then the Links list will include such things as Calendars, Permissions, Folder Statistics and Client Access, but of course this is down to you since you can add links easily.

The middle section of the Actions pane includes such things as Change Properties, Disable and Remove. These actions are typical for operations required on a mailbox.

Finally the lowest of the three sections has a series of Actions Common, in this case to report on the contents. In fact, this appears to be a pretty comprehensive reporting facility that allows reports to be generated in multiple formats, including HTML, CSV and XML, or even copied to the Clipboard. As objects are highlighted in the centre pane, their attributes can be selected from a list and displayed in the centre columns. The selection may then be used to generate a report, or pasted into a Notepad or Word document. Only the objects selected are reported.

For changing objects or adding items, the centre pane is the operations base. The objective is to list out the attributes that require modification and then do an operation. You can select the attributes from a drop-down list of relevant attributes for the object in question. You highlight the fields to be changed and click on the Change Properties button, and a dialogue box pops up allowing values to be input. It is all so simple – no commands to remember, just a GUI.

Selection process
The hierarchy I referred to earlier is highly configurable. New nodes in the hierarchy can be added for any of the generic PowerShell commands. In fact, the node creation process is really all about selecting the correct PowerShell command. If you haven't a clue which command to use, the field next to the command (not explicitly labelled) will accept random but associated words to drill down to the required PowerShell command. This is a dynamic feature and I suspect that we will all get quite familiar with the most common PowerShell commands over time.

From a very basic initial interface it is easy to build up a series of commands, all PowerShell based, from which Exchange may be managed. If you find that this mammoth command structure is useful to others, the whole thing may be exported to a neutral file and subsequently re-imported onto another workstation.

GUI-based front ends have been around for years in all the previous versions of Exchange, but not Exchange 2007. For some reason, these basic GUI-based requirements were missed. PowerGUI is also more configurable than a normal GUI. Essentially, from a simple base point it is possible to build a complete management structure from which to manage the Exchange infrastructure. I have missed out the ability of this tool to manage other aspects of Active Directory, but I'll leave this for another time.

Testing, testing...
One of my watershed tests for any new system is what I term the Help File test. If I can install, understand and work the thing without recourse to the Help file or installation instructions – in other words, if the interfaces are sufficiently intuitive for me to dispensed with these complicated directions – it has the makings of a well-designed system.

PowerGUI definitely falls into this category. I muddled my way through without any problems, although my first attempt at the install stopped when the software detected that PowerShell was not installed – oops! Clearly this is not a desperately complicated system, but it does fill a very important gap and in my view it's well thought out and will be extremely useful to hard-pressed administrators.




Figure 2: From the properties of a mailbox server a dropdown list reveals the commandlets

If you don't have the time to even install the product, or you just want a quick overview, I recommend the online "Introduction to PowerGUI" recording. This very neatly wraps up all the most important features into a narrated CamTasia recording. The guy (Dmitry Sotnikov) who speaks over the actions has a curious accent and sounds a bit dreary, but he does give us a pretty concise overview of the product. (Watch out, though, because the second demonstration also requires MacroMedia Flash player, which is a bit of a pain.) There's a series of these recordings and they are all worth watching.

As it is completely free I'd recommend that you check out PowerGUI – it may save you a lot of time, and it will certainly save you frazzling your brain with hundreds of PowerShell commands.