PowerShell 3.0 Drives Windows Management

A third version of PowerShell, Microsoft’s command-line interface (CLI) shell and scripting engine for Windows, was released with Windows Server 2012, Windows 8, and Windows RT. PowerShell is an important tool for managing Windows desktop and server applications, such as Exchange Server, Office 365, and even some third-party tools, such as VMware’s Infrastructure Toolkit for Windows. Customers and partners, especially those who have not yet adopted PowerShell, should begin evaluating the updated version.

Why PowerShell?

PowerShell is replacing traditional shells and batch files because of its ties to the .NET Framework. In traditional shells, commands are discrete, stand-alone programs that input and output streams of text. To compose a script, administrators often combine multiple commands in a manner that allows the parsing of the text output of one command (with utilities such as grep and awk or custom parsers) and passing (or “piping”) the parsed output to other commands.

In contrast, PowerShell commands (called cmdlets, pronounced “commandlets”) are .NET code, running under the control of the Common Language Runtime, that communicate with one another by exchanging structured data objects rather than text. This allows PowerShell administrators to pass the output of one command to another without intermediate text-processing, obviating the need for separate text-processing utilities. The result is simpler command-line instructions and scripts.