Enhanced Dashboards with PSWriteHTML – Introducing InfoCards and Density Options

Dashimo ultimate goal is to be as easy to use as possible. With the introduction of it a few days ago I made a promise to myself that I want to keep it as simple to use as possible. If you don’t know what Dashimo is, have a read here – Meet Dashimo. When I posted it on Reddit few people had some ideas and feature request that would make it a bit nicer, and when I heard about I agreed. So today, after a couple of days I have a few updates. I also noticed that my examples might have been too hard to use and understand for beginners and people not having a lot of touch with Active Directory. This time all code you can find below will use Get-Process as a way to show you that you can use any output that comes as a Table.

In today’s digital age, the ability to create compelling and informative HTML reports and documents is a crucial skill for professionals in various fields. Whether you’re a data analyst, a system administrator, a developer, or simply someone who wants to present information in an organized and visually appealing manner, having the right tools at your disposal can make all the difference. That’s where the PSWriteHTML PowerShell module steps in, offering an array of possibilities to suit your reporting needs.

When reading this blog post, you may be thinking that there’s nothing new one can add to emailing with PowerShell as there were tons of articles in recent years covering this subject pretty good. It’s all known, and people have used it since the early days of PowerShell. You can even send an email with just one line using Send-MailMessage. Now, this post is not about that. This post is about sending HTML based emails. You see when you want to send an email that is just text based that’s pretty trivial. Things get complicated when you want your emails to have some colors, some tables, some links or some lists. This is where you have to involve HTML and CSS. Since I’ve been working with PowerShell for a while now, I’ve seen my share of scripts/modules or blog posts that cover this but one thing that usually hit me – it was sometimes tough to understand what is happening, what the author is doing, and what happens if I change this or that. While I’ve seen people dismissing programmers doing HTML / CSS or JavaScript for not being real programmers, I disagree entirely. You have to know what you’re doing if you want your stuff to look good. I’ve spent days or even weeks playing with HTML/CSS/JS, and I must admit half of what I do I don’t even understand until I see the output. So before you go and tell people that HTML/CSS is easy, think again.

A few weeks ago, Mateusz Czerniawski, mentioned that he wants to build a Status Page for his company services. While I haven’t needed for myself, it seems like an excellent idea to try and create one in PowerShell. Since I’ve been working on PSWriteHTML for a while, it wasn’t that far fetched idea. While PSWriteHTML has a long way to go, to be in a state I want it to be, after a few days I had a prototype that didn’t require much work to generate. If you’re wondering what Status Page is it’s a little summary page for your users to check what is the status of services they use. It has been popular in the last few years and is offered by many services (Twitter, GitHub, Office 365 – they all have it). Companies are selling it as a service as well where you can host your status page for your users. This one is free.

Last few weeks, I’ve been working on making creating HTML based Dashboards, Reports, and Emails better. PSWriteHTML already allows fancy looking reports or emails without much effort, but this release makes it even more helpful. I will be mixing three PowerShell modules in this blost post – PSWriteHTML (responsible for creating HTML/CSS/JS code), Emailimo (simplifies creating emails based on PSWriteHTML) and Dashimo (simple dashboard building). If you’ve never heard of those modules before I encourage you to start from earlier blogs about them to understand the concepts before you dive into this one.  Hopefully, those will give you some ideas that will match what you will learn today.

PowerShell language allows you to work and build complicated objects. There are multiple ways to save them, such as XML or JSON, but sometimes using them is impossible or inadequate. Sometimes you want to use HTML or CSV or any other single dimension output.

In the Active Directory PowerShell module, you have two commands to your disposal that help display group membership. Those are Get-ADGroup and Get-ADGroupMember. The first command contains property Members, which gives you DistinguishedName of all members, and Get-ADGroupMember can provide you either direct members or with Recursive switch all members recursively (skipping groups). Till a few weeks ago, I was a happy user of those commands until I noticed two things. Member property for Get-ADGroup sometimes misses elements for whatever reason.

A few weeks ago, I posted a concept migration diagram for Office 365 to Twitter and Facebook. Today I thought I would show you how you can do it yourself using PowerShell and PSWriteHTML PowerShell module. When I started working on this, I’ve thought I want to create before and after infrastructure to see how it will look when migration ends. I’ve initially planned to assign myself an Office 365 Visio Plan 2 license and do something manually, thinking it may be just much easier. Unfortunately for me, there were no free Visio licenses in my tenant, and my laziness took over, so I’ve decided to give it a go using PowerShell only.

One of the everyday use cases with PSWriteHTML is to create a simple view of PowerShell data in a table. While PowerShell comes with a built-in cmdlet ConvertTo-Html, it’s basic in its functionality. It makes an HTML representation of PowerShell data, but it brings no CSS, JavaScript, or other functionality. While for some use cases, it’s enough, the other times, you need to make an effort to make it usable.

For the last few weeks I’m working on a small project, that should be released within next few weeks (it is open source so don’t worry – you’ll get to play with it). This project requires me to compare two or more objects and tell if those are equal and if those aren’t to what degree. Of course, PowerShell offers built-in functionality via Compare-Object command. It’s mighty but it leaves comparing differences, different properties to you. While there are probably other solutions that help users compare objects, I haven’t found anything that would meet my requirements. After I’ve written Compare-MultipleObjects function, I thought it could be interesting to implement visual comparison – you know human-readable – and I had the perfect place to apply it.

Last few days, I’ve fulfilled my little dream related to building HTML tables. You know I’ve been using HTML based scripts for a long while for Microsoft Exchange from multiple people like Steve Goodman or Paul Cunningham (and others) and when I was going thru their PowerShell building code on how they create an HTML table with multi-row titles I thought Those guys are crazy. The effort to build an HTML table for a report for a person who has no clue how to do it is not something one can easily digest and understand. Sure I’ve learned how to build HTML tables at some point, but there was one final piece that I was missing – multi-row headers. If you don’t know what I mean, and how they look like the below image from Steve’s Goodman script should give you a hint.

I’ve been using HTML reporting in PowerShell for a while. Initially, I would usually build HTML by hand, but the time spent trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t drive me mad. With the PSWriteHTML module, a lot has changed. With just a few PowerShell lines, I can create feature-rich reports that change how I show data to my Clients. Today I wanted to show you some advanced HTML reporting without actually complicating PowerShell code. In the last few months, I’ve added many features that create advanced reports without sacrificing readability.

Active Directory Trusts are useful to connect one or more domains. But as useful those are, they can be very dangerous. Also, keeping trusts working and in good shape should be a top priority for Active Directory Admins. While there is a couple of command in the Active Directory module Get-ADTrust, I thought I would try and write my own that checks a few more things. I want to thank Chris Dent for his input on the part of this command. His binary skills amaze me!