Friday, November 28, 2008

Download Pick: PowerGui - A graphical user interface and script editor for PowerShell.

Hello All,
Here is a great FREE utility to get you started learning and using Windows Powershell. The utility is called PowerGui and it is an extensible graphical administrative console and IDE for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell.

What is really cool is that PowerGui has built a pretty large following and community and already there are many contributions of what they call PowerPacks that are prebuilt consoles for things like Active Directory, Terminal Services, Hyper-V and yes even Citrix!

So here are a few links to get you started:
You can download PowerGUI from here:
http://powergui.org/downloads

Once you download and install PowerGui you can download and add the community created PowerPacks
There is a Terminal Services PowerPack you can get from here:
http://powergui.org/entry.jspa?externalID=2071&categoryID=296
This PowerPack allows basic administration of Termial Servers (view settings, permissions, enable/disable connections), RDP sessions (message, connect to, disconnect) and RDP connections (launch, edit settings).

There is one for the Citrix Console available at this link:
http://www.powergui.org/entry%21default.jspa?categoryID=296&externalID=2033
This is a pretty cool thing, you can logoff specific users, view printer, hotfixes, enable or disable apps and more. It would be excellent start to create a console for your help desk.

And one for Hyper-V here!
http://powergui.org/entry.jspa?externalID=2142&categoryID=290

There is quite a library of Powerpacks in categories such as Active Directory, Exchange, Windows Server, Reporting and more!
You can search through them here:
http://www.powergui.org/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=21

What is really cool is once you load the power packs there is a tab that lets you see what the powershell script is doing in the background.

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