Power Shell and SharePoint 2010

Why PowerShell ? Why Now ?

PowerShell was designed to do for Windows what the UNIX shells do for UNIX: provide a powerful, well-integrated command-line experience for the operation
system. Unfortunately since Windows is mostly managed through objects (WMI, COM and .NET) this required creating a new kind
of shell. So why create it now? As Windows moves off the desktop
and into server farms or application servers like print, DNS
and LDAP services, command-line automation becomes a
fundamental requirement.

PowerShell is freely available through the Microsoft Windows Update Service packaged as an optional update for Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. It is also included with Windows Server 2008 as an optional component.

In Sharepoint 2007,Farm Administrators used STSADM.EXE to do the administrative tasks. SharePoint Foundation still installs STSADM.EXE but it is primarily included to support backwards compatibility with scripts migrating from earlier versions.

PowerShell is something i was always love to have in the production farm.In MOSS 2007,there were many things which can be done through object model easily,can’t done through STSADM.EXE.Sharepoint  2010 is the first version to directly support PowerShell.In PowerShell, You can directly access Sharepoint object model through the codes in the console window. Nice …isn’t it ?

I started exploring PowerShell long back. In next couple of posts, i will try to provide comprehensive list of operations you need to know to get your hands dirty on PowerShell.