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By Przemyslaw Klys

PowerShell Modules I worked on in 2019

It’s year 2020 and 365 days passed since my last year blog post about PowerShell modules I worked on in 2018. I thought it would be a good occasion to review what happened and how things changed during that time. When I wrote the last blog post in the first days of 2019, my PowerShell modules were downloaded just a bit over 15000 times. Fast Forward today, and the counter is at 280000 times spread over 40 modules. Of course, not all those modules are equal. In 2019 I created multiple new PowerShell modules, but some modules were archived, while others were migrated back to their “parents”. Just to see how my community road was going in the last years I decided to check some statistics.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Merging, splitting and creating PDF files with PowerShell

We’re in the last days of 2019, and this will be my last blog post this year. What better way to end a good year than with the release of the new PowerShell module. If the title of today’s blog post isn’t giving it up yet, I wanted to share a PowerShell module called PSWritePDF that can help you create and modify (split/merge) PDF documents. It joins my other PowerShell modules to create different types of documents such as PSWriteWord, PSWriteExcel, PSWriteHTML. I know that PSWriteExcel is relatively basic, but both PSWriteHTML and PSWriteWord deliver robust build capabilities.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Sending Messages to Microsoft Teams from PowerShell just got easier and better

Christmas time is upon us, and I’ve decided that my PSTeams module needs some love. I wrote it in late 2018 and updated it a few times at the beginning of 2019. This release hopefully is worth of having 1.0 version number. I don’t do that often and usually go for build numbers changes only, but Microsoft Teams message cards have their limits on functionality. Therefore, there are not many things that can be added unless Microsoft opens up and gives us all the cool features of Adaptive Cards. PSTeams module uses Webconnector to send messages to Teams. That method only supports Message Cards, which even Microsoft calls Legacy. But legacy doesn’t mean fully functional with some cool features of their own. If you’re new to PSTeams you may want to read those 2 posts below to get information how to set it up.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Getting Azure Health by parsing HTML using PSParseHTML

Some time ago I’ve wrote PowerShell way to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, and if you were thinking that I would try the same concept for Azure Services you were right. However, I failed. This is because Office 365 Health can be gathered using Microsoft Graph API, and Azure Health information, as far as I know, is not available in the form I wanted it. Azure Status is available as part of Azure Status website. Contrary to Office 365 health you don’t have to login to your Office 365 tenant to read it.

By Przemyslaw Klys

What do we say to health checking Active Directory?

Setting up a new Active Directory is an easy task. You download and install Windows Server, install required roles and in 4 hours or less have a basic Active Directory setup. In an ideal world that would be all and your only task would be to manage users, computers, and groups occasionally creating some Group Policies. Unfortunately, things with Active Directory aren’t as easy as I’ve pictured it. Active Directory is a whole ecosystem and works well ranging from small companies with ten users to 500k users or more (haven’t seen one myself – but so they say!). When you scale Active Directory adding more servers, more domains things tend to get complicated, and while things on top may look like they work correctly, in practice, they may not. That’s why, as an Administrator, you need to manage Active Directory in terms of its Health and Security. Seems easy right? Not quite. While you may think you have done everything, checked everything, there’s always something missing. Unless you have instructions for everything and can guarantee that things stay the same way as you left them forever, it’s a bit more complicated. That’s why Microsoft delivers you tools to the troubleshoot your Active Directory, such as dcdiag, repadmin and some others. They also sell monitoring solutions such as Microsoft SCOM which can help and detect when some things happen in your AD while you were gone. Surely there are some 3rd party companies give you some tools that can help with a lot of that as well. Finally, there is lo of folks within the community creating PowerShell scripts or functions that help with some Health Checks of your Active Directory.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Comparing two or more objects visually in PowerShell (cross-platform)

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.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Formatting and minifying resources (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) with PowerShell

When you work with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you often meet three versions on how those are stored in files – minified, formatted, somewhere in the middle (usually a total mess). I have all three versions in my PSWriteHTML module. Some are minified 3rd party resources, some are generated by my PowerShell commands (and are a total mess when it comes to formatting), and finally, some are formatted resources by using built-in VSCode features. In whatever form they are, they generally have no impact on how browsers display them. Browsers will read them in any kind and not care for how they look.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Working with HTML in PowerShell just got better

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.

By Przemyslaw Klys

Sending HTML emails with PowerShell and zero HTML knowledge required

I saw this article by Altaro tweeted Building PowerShell Tools for MSPs: HTML Tables for Reporting, and it describes how you can create HTML emails with just a few lines of code. Luke created that article in 2018 (tweets from the archive I guess), but I just saw it now so thought I would make a slight comparison. In 2018 I would probably go the same way as shown by Luke Orellana, who takes a simple example of querying WMI to get disk drive sizes and send them over, formatted via Email.

By Przemyslaw Klys

All your HTML Tables are belong to us

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.

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