What kind of useful things can one create/automate with Powershell in a small office?

Greetings,

I'm looking for any ideas in regards to anything I can have automated in a very small (20 person) office. I want to better familiarize myself with Powershell and scripting in general, so its more out of convenience/experimenting than necessity. Thanks!

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Qord

Anything you do multiple times or often is a good candidate for automation. Is there anything you can think of that fits that description? Creating shares, homedirectories, software installs, anything?

GarudaMin

Checking local admins (access control), installed applications/updates list (for software inventory and patch management) are good candidates. But you want to be careful with any scripting that modifies existing settings.

the_Grinch

I always find that it is easier when you have an idea of what you'd like to automate.

Nyblizzard

Thanks for the responses. The office is small (but growing) and most things are handled by HQ in Irvine, CA (I'm in NYC). I feel as if more things can, and maybe should be handled on locally (we just set up a local VM for users to access, they are delighted at the increased speeds).

For now I guess I'm looking for something along the lines of automating malware/virus scans, running every machine through a master list of applications/updates, quick way to automate an install if I have to do it for more than one user (again I could just as easily do them individually, but I'm trying to learn automation on a small scale)

lsud00d

You could make a leaderboard for most invalid AD authentication attempts

But, without knowing what you use at your office it's very hard to say. There are a lot of different powershell modules depending on what products you work with.

Nyblizzard

lsud00d wrote: »

You could make a leaderboard for most invalid AD authentication attempts

But, without knowing what you use at your office it's very hard to say. There are a lot of different powershell modules depending on what products you work with.

I love the sound of some sort of leaderboard/charts I can send out to the staff to show how IT can bring some comedic value

This is at a high-end design and architectural firm that works heavily within the Adobe and Autodesk suite. We have dedicated tech support for that software so I'm not sure how much freedom I'd have to automate anything there.

Qord

I'll start with the simplest of what you mentioned: software installs, here's how I learned to do it. For educational purposes, figure out how to *successfully* do the install via the command line (I generally "****" and use psexec for this part). Once you've got that down, figure out how to move/copy the needed files around the network. Then, figure out how to execute the installation process through powershell. Put it all together, and when you've got it working maybe try adding pretty things like try/catch and error logging.

6502

I made a good one today. A user creates a company extension list and she needed a better way of getting the information she needed. I created a script using get-aduser to get users name, e-mail, department and phone #. It excludes disabled and administrator accounts and spits it out to a csv file nightly.