PowerShell Clean Up of SharePoint Document Libraries

Paul King has a nice PowerShell script to clean up SharePoint Document Library files with no versions.  The issue at hand is when a user adds files to a document library using drag-and-drop but doesn’t check the file in to for content management.

A powerful library tool in SharePoint document libraries is the ability to open the document library with Explorer.  If you have the Windows Desktop Experience installed […], you can open an Explorer Window that will allow you to drag and drop files directly into the document library.

Unfortunately, with this power, comes responsibility.  When versioning is enabled on the document library and performing drag & drop additions in this way, the items are not checked in.  Instead, you must check them in manually before they can be seen and used by anyone else who has permissions to that document library.

Paul wrote a script that finds the files that haven’t been checked in (unversioned files) and then checks them in automatically.

• #Sharepoint
• #powershell
• #PowerSE
• #powerwf

PowerShell & PowerCLI One Liners

Posted:    Oct 5, 2011 
Updated:  Oct 10, 2011

• ICT Freak has a one-liner to Disconnect ISO files from a VM template.
• ValCO labs has a PowerCLI one-liner to find which datastore your scratch partition is on.
• Zsoldier has a couple of one-liners to save VI-credentials to an XML file and then use them later.  Interestingly, the credentials XML file only works on the machine they were created on.
• Here’s a really long one-liner for populating a Sharepoint document library.
• And don’t forget this little gem I found for removing expired AD certificates.

• #PowerSE
• #one-liners
• #powercli
• #powershell
• #Active Directory
• #SharePoint

PowerShell for SharePoint Primer

SharePointPro Magazine has a rather lengthy article/primer for SharePoint Administrators, explaining the need for PowerShell in their world, as well as giving them some quick samples on how to use it in their everyday work.  I would point out that it is much easier for SharePoint Administrators to get up to speed with PowerShell by using PowerWF and PowerSE.

As with any new release, there was a lot to learn when SharePoint 2010 hit the streets. There were new features to master, and there were even some old features with which to get reacquainted. Typically, I’m up for such a challenge. Heck, I revel in it. However, one of the biggest challenges that I almost didn’t overcome was learning Windows PowerShell.

…

Until that moment in 2009, my exposure to PowerShell had been very limited. I had mostly avoided it because it seemed to “developery” for my tastes. It had objects, whatever those are. I’m a simple man. Stsadm, while limited and quirky, was easy to tame. PowerShell was complicated and bombastic. I honestly wasn’t sure if I was smart enough to trick it into doing my bidding or leverage it like I had Stsadm. I found myself in the first of the seven stages of grief.

…

One day it finally hit me, I was going at this backward. Instead of learning the language so that someday I could use PowerShell to get tasks done in SharePoint, I should start trying to automate daily SharePoint tasks as a way to help me learn the language. Of all the PowerShell lessons I’ve learned, this one is the most important. That was the day the skies opened up and the sun shone down on me and PowerShell.

(read more and get sample scripts)

The article continues for several pages with 4 or 5 examples of using PowerShell in the real world for SharePoint Administrators.

• #powershell
• #Sharepoint
• #powerwf
• #PowerSE

SharePoint Deployment via PowerShell

Jerry Orman at Adventures in SharePoint has a short post on deploying SharePoint 2010 using PowerShell.

Put together a small script that to help automate deployment of a solution.  The script handles the following:

• Install and Deploy a farm level solution
• Activate a web application scoped feature
• Activate a site collection scoped feature

The tricky part with scripting this occurs when the solution is deployed [Install-SPSolution cmdlet].  The script needs to wait for the deployment to finish before activating the features.  Without waiting, the script will immediately continue, and try to activate the features that have not been deployed yet. That means evil red text will appear complaining about features not existing in the farm.

(read more and get script)

The PowerShell script is fairly well documented so it is easy to see what it is doing.

• #Sharepoint
• #powershell
• #powerwf
• #PowerSE

PowerShell Script to Change Sharepoint Passwords

In my ever present quest to find great PowerShell resources I stumbled across a blog by Alpesh Nakar.  Alpesh is a Sharepoint consultant who has also been blogging about Office 365 of late.  In a recent post, he writes about how to change managed account password for Sharepoint 2010 Service accounts using PowerShell.  Of course this peaked my interest.

Of all days in the week, on Sunday [August 21, 2011] I decided to tease my SharePoint 2010 development environment! I decided to change all the SharePoint 2010 Service Account(s)password.

Thank you Microsoft for introducing the managed accounts, else I would be clicking away for a long time, having to go through each application pool to change the password (map this scenario to MOSS 2007 or WSSv3). With managed accounts associated with application pools, it was a matter of changing the password for the managed account and it would ‘cascade’ down…

Alpesh discusses how much of a pain the bulk password change would be using the Central Administration GUI, but he also provides a relatively simple PowerShell script that he used to accomplish his goal:

So, I decided to get my hands dirty with PowerShell! Here is the script to use an ‘existing password’ from the active directory (after it has been changed in the ADS) for my managed account that I am using for all my demo web applications

#Set Execution Policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -force

#Import SharePoint Module
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -EA silentlycontinue

$m = Get-SPManagedAccount -Identity “sharepoint\sa-spcontent”

Set-SPManagedAccount -Identity $m  -ExistingPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString “pass@word2” -AsPlainText -force) –confirm

iisreset

PowerShell experts, your feedback will be highly appreciated!

• #sharepoint
• #powershell
• #powerwf
• #PowerSE