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Tag: Helpful Admin Tips

PowerShell Script: SharePoint Farm Creation

PowerShell Script: SharePoint Farm Creation

For a long time I have been meaning to rewrite the PowerShell script that I have been using to do my SharePoint farm creation and just haven’t gotten around to completing the necessary effort to make it all that I want it to be. I have leveraged the work of others, borrowing a piece here and a snippet there but to honest I haven’t been satisfied. What I really wanted was a script that I can use in my consulting…

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Updated PowerShell Profiles Creation Script

Updated PowerShell Profiles Creation Script

    While enjoying Doug Hemminger’s presentation at the SharePoSH meeting tonight I realized that I hadn’t published an update to my How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session every time post, even though I had fixed some issues with the script more than 2 months ago. FYI, I still blame Todd Klindt for prompting me to write this thing in the first place by introducing me to start-transcript… I updated the version of code in the previous post from…

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How to: Activate Desktop Experience in Windows Server 2012

How to: Activate Desktop Experience in Windows Server 2012

I ran into an issue where I needed to active that Desktop Experience in on Windows Server 2012 and found that it was not in the same place that I was expecting it to be from previous versions. Figured that this might help some people. Desktop Experience is required to be running if you are going to utilize OneNote, which when working in a demo server environment can be very useful. There are some DLLs that are not accessible unless…

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How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session every time

How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session every time

Preface At SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire I sat in a packed room and listened as Todd Klindt showed everyone how to install SharePoint 2013 without screwing it up (too badly). The big take away for me was this command that I had not heard about before called start-transcript. The power of start-transcript is that it is able to write everything that you do in a PowerShell session to a log file that you can review later. Todd demo’ed how he…

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How to: Create a OneNote help file out of a PowerShell Module

How to: Create a OneNote help file out of a PowerShell Module

Being an ITPro in the current day and age I write a decent amount of PowerShell. Since I am not always on a server that has the SharePoint PowerShell modules installed most of my time on TechNet is spent basically reading the help files of specific modules to validate syntax, flags or review examples. This can become a bit of a pain after a while so I thought it would be nice to have a OneNote notebook on my SkyDrive…

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Hooray, it’s a book!: “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”

Hooray, it’s a book!: “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”

Over the past year I have been spending my night’s & weekends working on a book with my co-author, Dave Feldman, and I am proud to say that we have completed our draft of “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint”.  Through the book you will learn to create dynamic Business Intelligence solutions for SharePoint, using Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, SQL Server 2012, and other tools and technologies. This hands-on book shows you how to create data-rich BI applications with SharePoint…

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250 USB drives to load? WHERE IS MY POWERSHELL CAPE???

250 USB drives to load? WHERE IS MY POWERSHELL CAPE???

In preparation for SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire I had to load 250 USB drives with sponsor’s digital collateral. The fun last evening was getting all of the little buggers out of their individual boxes and sealed plastic wrappers in order to make loading them a bit faster. Today I ran out to Best Buy and purchased a pair of Belkin 7-Port USB 2.0 Powered Hubs and then sat down to “borrow” some PowerShell commands from someone on the interwebs. Sadly,…

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SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire is upon us!

SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire is upon us!

With only 3 days to the big event things are rapidly coming together.  The bags, speaker gifts, t-shirts, buttons, digital collateral, prizes and jump drives are all here and ready for Saturday.  I am excited for my presentation “ITPro’s taking the SharePoint 2013 “red pill” will be a ton of fun to present and should be informational as well.  More than anything I am excited that my co-organizers and I have been able to assemble an amazing cast of speakers to…

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How to: Run PowerShell ISE as Administrator under alternate credentials

How to: Run PowerShell ISE as Administrator under alternate credentials

Coming from a security focused AD background I prefer to have the Managed Service Accounts OU locked down with a GPO restricting interactive logon to a server. This helps avoid service accounts becoming compromised and being taken advantage of in attacks. Having an ISE is especially helpful when you are doing SharePoint work on the farm and while I am a big fan of PowerShell, running straight at the command line is often a pain. Rather than installing one of…

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How to disable Shutdown Event Tracker in Windows Server 2008 R2

How to disable Shutdown Event Tracker in Windows Server 2008 R2

Scenario: You have people in your office, you are in the middle of work in 2 different Dev VMs plus Visual Studio on your host or you are working on several servers plus your local Dev VM while writing admin scripts (making this viable for Admin and Dev types alike).  Time for a reboot of your Dev VM so you click on reboot and flip back to your other work and figure you will check back in 10 minutes once…

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