Forum Discussion
MicrosoftWhat do you use PowerShell for the most in Office 365?
(2) Managing Exchange Online
(3) Manage users and Groups
Paul SummersCan you provide additional detail? Site creation? Settings management? DLP rules? Mailbox creation?
I am guessing you do a lot, but curious what provides the most value and efficiency for you. Thanks!
Paul,
It's really an impossible question to answer. The reason why PowerShell is so valuable is that it fills in most of the gaps left by Microsoft in the administration tools. It has always been so since Exchange 2007 was the first server product to support PowerShell. Microsoft cannot be expected to know how customers will automate their operations or look for different tweaks that are important to the customer and utterly unimportant elsewhere and this is the role PowerShell plays.
Our Office 365 for IT Pros eBook has 840 PowerShell examples of doing stuff across Office 365. There is lots of mailbox management, lots of group management, lots of SharePoint management - and the apps that are weak in PowerShell support, like Teams and Planner, are much less powerful because of that. Microsoft doesn't help here from time to time, as in failing to update the Groups PowerShell cmdlets to allow admins to identify what groups are teams-enabled, what have plans, and what use connectors... that kind of information is invaluable to admins.
TR
The type of tasks performed via PowerShell will vary from company to company and from admin to admin, but in general most of the usage I see is around ExO and AAD. Configuring mailbox settings, assigning permissions, assigning licenses, generating reports, creating objects such as DGs or shared mailboxes - it's all pretty "standard" and usually automated in the form of a PowerShell script that takes some input. Then there's the "scheduled task" scenario with having some more complex script run in the backgrouond to performs tasks such as generate reports, automate license management, automate feature provisioning and so on.
And don't forget that there are some tasks that can only be performed via PowerShell (as in, the relevant cotnrols are not exposed in a UI).
