I understand how you feel, and I was irritated about it at first, too. But IMHO, if you're missing out on a lot if you only use it when you're forced into it by Exchange.
Once I spent some time learning it, I started using it for lots of other things. I manage AD with it, using the Quest AD cmdlet snapin. I use it to extract and report on data from both my Exchange transport logs and my Ironport appliance logs. I run a script that sends emails out my Ironports at the boundary, and then checks how long it took to make the round trip through Frontbridge and back through my Edge servers, and emails me if it's taking too long. I run scheduled scripts that delete old IIS log files on my CAS servers, and tell me if they're starting to use more disk space than normal. I've used it to save and restore file permissions on thousands of directories at once. I use it to run ping sweeps and check the DNS resolution of anything that answers, and put the results in a spreadsheet. I'm probably starting to sound insane, but I really do like it. -----Original Message----- From: John Hornbuckle [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 4:14 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Scripting vs. GUI And personal choice/preference. By giving users a choice, both the GUI and the CLI crowd can be pleased--let users select the method they prefer. Obviously, there has to be a limit; not every CLI command can be integrated in a GUI. But I'm not asking for additional GUI capabilities; I'm just asking for the ones that used to exist with a prior version. -----Original Message----- From: Campbell, Rob [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 4:13 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: RE: Scripting vs. GUI I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that, as a rule, the perception of the superiority of one approach over the other will vary according to the size of the enterprise being managed. -----Original Message----- From: Jason Gurtz [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 2:48 PM To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Scripting vs. GUI > Big example... Looking at mailbox sizes. With Ex2003, I could very easily > do this via GUI. I could quickly sort my users by item count or mailbox > size. Now I have to do this from EMS, which is just not at quick. I am certainly no PS expert and no Exchange expert either but this thread is reminding me a lot about things I've read/head about the Office 2007 ribbon. They can mostly be distilled down to something like, "I know how to do this really fast with version previous and now I don't." I often wonder if the misery is a result of "already knowing." In my case, Word and Excel 2007 were semi-frustrating for about 9 months...and now they're not much at all and for the most part faster and less annoying than before. In this exact task given here I am *always* frustrated with how long it takes to do in the GUI: first wait for the slow loading (on a 2x CPU Athlon XP, 2GB box, why?) System Manager...now click the little plus thingy...oh wait, was that recipients I wanted to know about or administrative groups? ;) ...back to the plus...do it again...do it again...wait for loading...do it again...resize this )@#$^(&* stupid pane that doesn't *ever* remember!...click the last plus...ahhh...finally click mailboxes...praise all-that-is-good we only have to wait for a couple hundred items here and not thousands. Oh but wait! NOW I have to click a column heading not once, but twice to see who's wasting all that space or resign myself to scroll. Lovely! =) Now, no doubt due to my lack of experience with Exchange, I find myself hunting about in the System Manager applet fairly often, googling, reading blogs, msexchangeteam, this list, etc... when the more arcane tasks come up; I wish I could say the same as you and jump right to where I want to be in there all the time. Even so, I've never heard anyone say that Exch 2003 System Manager was very well organized. I see what you're saying WRT discoverability being more inherent in a GUI (some people, NOT ME HERE, would argue vehemently against that). However, continually thumbing through PS docs every time to find what to type doesn't seem very productive to me. While having more GUI tools might help for the occasional admin (and I can't speak for your environment) I feel an organized hierarchical directory of scripts that you develop once and then just click on (or scheduled task) in the future goes a really really long way and will ultimately eclipse any gui over time for routine things in terms of efficiency. Isn't this the whole point of scripting? This latter approach certainly saves a lot of time here every patch Tuesday with the servers and when we get exchange 07 or 10 here I expect it will be the same case with adds/removes/changes and other administrative drudgery. The first little while is always a slog...but it is very often worth it in the end! Not to say your point about missing GUI tools isn't valid but I can't say it's a catastrophic shortcoming even for the smaller shop like us here. In the given example I would wager money that I could develop and debug a PS script for Exchange 2007 in under 2 hours such that I could click it and have my answer in a few seconds every time in the future. Further, I bet with just a few small modifications, the script would sort by item count instead of size. Or maybe it would ask me every time I ran it? Hmm, now that someone helpfully posted a link about a powerpack supporting Exch 2003 I might just see about that! ~JasonG ~ Ninja Email Security with Cloudmark Spam Engine Gets Image Spam ~ ~ http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Ninja ~ ************************************************************************************************** Note: The information contained in this message may be privileged and confidential and protected from disclosure. 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