@Nick @wayne riddle

Ed might have made a booboo on the math but speaking as somebody who had to manage an Active Directory infrastructure for a decent size user environment it still adds up.

What you also get out of using PowerShell is Consistency in User Creation and ease of use in certain day to day Management tasks.

Think on the Lunch hour when everybody seems to lose their brains and forget their passwords. Invariably you have 5 people (random uses too, that drove me nuts) coming up and having locked themselves out.

Old process, find user in GUI, unlock account, maybe reset password.
Do this again 5 times
Oh right
Somewhere in this process somebody locked themselves out again (Grrrr) reset their password again.

I found at lunch time this was an ongoing 20 to 30 minute battle daily depending upon who/how many times they did it/how urgent it was to them and how far up the ladder they would go to bypass the Support Queue.

With PowerShell it was one Cmdlet in Quest (Unlock-Qaduser) with a quick "up cursor, type new name enter"

The other one you ran across were users that had to be disabled at a specific time. In Powershell with Quest I could immediately type in Disable-QADUser accountname and there access was off *or* schedule a task to run that Cmdlet at the days end.

So maybe on creating users I did not save 25 hours a week but on regular tasks? User creation, Disabling, password resets, unlocks (especially when I created a script to fully automate the user creation process across multiple environments *AND* do that with a simple prompt of "First Name, Lastname, Division, Location")

Yeah.... I also forgot to mention that we had this tied into a SOX compliant process. The time saved when the company would onboard 5 or 10 staff plus offboarding *AND* auditing A/D for changes..... EASILY 25 hours saved per week with Powershell.

Sean
Windows PowerShell MVP

Great overview! Scripting in general, and PowerShell in particular, is incredibly important for anyone with responsibilities in IT on the Microsoft side of the fence.

A quick image search for 'are you too busy to improve' illustrates the importance of this... Sadly, it can be tough to motivate those stuck pushing the cart of manual, unscalable process. https://hakanforss.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/are-you-too-busy-to-improve2.png

I wrote a quick bit on this a while back and continuously try to motivate and encourage co-workers on how important it is to build scalable, consistent processes. http://ramblingcookiemonster.wordpress.com/2013/12/07/why-powershell/. Sadly, many cling to the status quo. 'I want to do it manually so I know it's done right.'

Even more dangerous than individuals who don't see the light is management that sees part of the light. Yes, we need to design scalable, consistent processes, but... can you do our team's work for them? They're too busy and don't have time to learn how to script. Don't fall for this trap, it might be fun at first, but try to encourage their teams to learn this. Give a helping hand, offer to work with them and get them going with PowerShell and the technologies they need to use, but make sure you are teaching them to fish, and not fishing for them.

Cheers!

I say, its a must for every SharePoint administrator to learn to script in PowerShell, in order to effectively work on SharePoint.