Update-Module : Module ‘PowershellGet’ was not installed by using Install-Module, so it cannot be updated.

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.

I’ve been working on cleaning up Group Policies for a couple of months. While it may seem trivial, things get complicated when you’re tasked with managing 5000 GPOs created over 15 years by multiple teams without any best practices in mind. While working on GPOZaurr (my new PowerShell module), I’ve noticed that the more code I wrote to manage those GPOs, the more I knew passing this knowledge to admins who will be executing this on a weekly/monthly basis is going to be a challenge. That’s why I’ve decided to follow a similar approach as my other Active Directory testing module called Testimo. I’ve created a single command that analyses Group Policies using different methods and shows views from different angles to deliver the full picture. On top of that, it provides a solution (or it tries to) so that it’s fairly easy to fix – as long as you agree with what it proposes.

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.

A few days ago, I was asked to take a look at PowerShell Malware. While I don’t know much about malware, my curiosity didn’t let me skip on this occasion, and I was handed over WindowsPowerShell.evtx file. Ok, that’s not what I expected! I wanted PowerShell .ps1 files that I can read and assess? Well, you play with the cards you were dealt with. What I was handed over was PowerShell Event Log. PowerShell writes whatever you execute, and it thinks it is risky, to Windows PowerShell Operation Event Log.

I’m working on a new feature for one of my modules that requires me to know what kind of files I am working with. It’s quite easy in PowerShell, and without a lot of code, you can reasonably quickly get necessary information about data stored on your desktop or anywhere else for that matter.

A new branch of PSWinReporting is slowly coming, and I thought it would be the best time to have a final article about it with all configuration options available for those that will want to stay using PSWinReporting from Legacy branch. The idea is that you may have it working in your systems and it’s good enough for you. You may not want to change it, and with New Hope, the changes are so big it’s a rewrite.

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.

PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.

Everyone now and then, there comes a moment you need to add a user into Administrators group on each computer…

Working as a small business often brings you little tasks here and there. Today I’ve decided to shut down the Hyper-V machine to expand its disks. Unfortunately for me, while extending of HDD went great, I couldn’t start Virtual Machine any longer.

A few days ago, I tried to use Install-Module on the old Windows 2008R2 system that I use for specific tasks.