Custom Helpdesk AD Console!

I've tried no less than three times over the course of my career to create a custom MMC implementation for the help desk fellows.  Admittedly, I haven't tried hard, but I've spent a few hours here and there, first with the "taskpad" functionality within the MMC itself, and most recently with PrimalForms.

Today I was encouraged to see that Dmitry from Quest had written about this very capability in the interest of soliciting beta testers for PowerGUI 1.7.  He described in his post just about exactly what I'd been trying unsuccessfully to accomplish, so I hit Darin Pendergraft up this afternoon to express my interest.  After one round of e-mails describing my dream for a custom locked-down Powershell-based console for the helpdesk, and after about 15 minutes, Dmitry had something mocked up that looked just like what I wanted.

I guess the point(s) is (are) that a) Quest is great, and b) PowerGUI is pretty cool, and c) it never hurts to ask.

I hope to either get something close to this from Quest.  If I'm misunderstanding and they're not actually planning to give this to us out of the kindness of their hearts, I'll set about trying to build it myself.  Either way, I'll report back here and share.

MS Course 6434

I'm sitting in day 1 of 6434 right now. Will try to liveblog if there's anything worth discussing.

It seems like this course might be too basic for me, but the final few modules may be valuable: Module 8 is WMI, 9 is around AD (wonder what they'll talk about if they're not using the Quest cmdlets OR V2), and 10 is about COM.

I'm concerned that V2 hasn't even been mentioned, even in passing. I know it's not in the curriculum, but the instructor should probably at least let people know that it's coming and that they should expect some changes.

The rest of the class seems to mostly be beginners.

Kind of an interesting question, although I'm not sure how practical it is: the instructor demonstrated the (cmdlet).property syntax with (get-date).day. A classmate asked how one would display both month and day. Turns out a way to do this is to use the -uformat parameter:

PS> get-date -uformat "%m%d"

The MS Learning materials frequently alternate between aliased and expanded versions of cmdlets. This might be confusing for the beginners in the class - does everyone know that "Where" is the same thing as "Where-Object"?

...Discussion about hashtables without a good explanation of the @{} syntax.

I mistakenly got the class sidetracked about the distinction between get-item and get-childitem. I'm still not completely sure I get it.

The exercises aren't bad - they include pretty useful real-world server admin stuff - but they also include cmdlets and syntax we didn't discuss in the lessons... if I was new to this, I'd probably be totally lost already. Another weird thing: "Lab Review" for Module 3 doesn't make any sense. We didn't use Get-Member once during the lab, but all of the review questions are about Get-Member. I think Microsoft needs to hire me to work on their training materials.