The first post in this series covered the basics of PowerShell including variables, loops, and decisions. It also introduced a few scripts I’ve used over the last several weeks. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use PowerShell in a SharePoint farm, some of the more useful capabilities (especially to developers), and a few more scripts that I’ve written to bring the topics covered together.
Integrating PowerShell With SharePoint
PowerShell has been natively supported in SharePoint since SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. When SharePoint is installed, in addition to the Product Configuration Wizard and Central Administration shortcuts, a shortcut for the SharePoint Management Shell is available. This application is a PowerShell console with a blue background and the SharePoint Snap-in loaded. The PowerShell Snap-in is a PowerShell version 1 object that, when loaded, makes additional functions (or cmdlets) available to call in the current PowerShell session. To do this, simply execute the following:
Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
This will allow you to access the SharePoint cmdlets in any PowerShell session. It’s also important to run the PowerShell or SharePoint Management Shell console as administrator as the logged-in user may only have limited access to the SharePoint farm.
