Hi All,
I work in an IT Support (Helpdesk/Desktop Support) type role and was in the process of learning Powershell and putting together some PS scripts to help make my teams daily lives more efficient.
Is there any good utilities out there that can be simply modified to point to my various scripts.
eg, a GUI that has like a task list that i can customise such as when you launch it the menu would be like:
Script 1 – Perform this Task
Script 2 – Perform that Task
And then i edit the task list to point Script 1 menu item to run a certain script and so on?
I’m keen to hear from others in similar role to see how they operate as i would like to make a gui front end so that others can use my scripts easier?
We have been using powershell studio for some time. It’s not intuitive, but works very well. It takes practice (as everything does) to create a workflow to easily update your changes to the gui/forms created, and then package them as exe’s or msi’s.
We use is for everything from finding the next available computer name in AD, to adding specific types of user accounts and generating all subsequent emails and notifications necessary, post image processes, etc. Takes a bit of time, but has made my life easier instead of telling users, now right click run with powershell, answer the text questions. Now I create on the fly populated drop downs and check boxes.
There is literally a half dozen different ways to do this without buy Sapien’s PowerShell Studio. Now don’t get me wrong, I have used SPS since the early days (and highly recommend it) and still do for major projects. Yet, for this ask, you can do this with the built-In PowerShell ISE, using the Out-GrideView a menu thing or create your own console menu for such thing.
The question is, do you really need a GUI for you operational effort or will a console menu work.
Now, using a GUI (like, PowerShell ISE -free, Sapien’s PowerShell Studio - $$$, Idera’s PowerShellPlus - free ) to create this stuff, sure (well, cost and learning curve aside), but to use your stuff maybe.
It is really very simple to create a GUI form with either, yet, you sound like you want to dynamically re-arrange, add/remove options. This means you have maintenance, up keep and versioning to worry about and getting those new versions and change to the team regularly. That might be a lot of undue work.
It might be just easier for you to create your own internal PowerShell Gallery (PSRepository), place all your scripts there and have them marked as Task001, Task002, etc… with a description of what the task is, what it is to be used for and how.
I made something similar to this a while back for a client. So that they could update as they wanted I had the GUI Get-Content of all ps1 files within a folder and display the results for them to select and click run. This way if they needed to add or remove scripts they simply changed them in the folder and the GUI always updated automatically.