Ed Wilson: Well … the week is nearly done

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Today is Thursday! Yep, the week is nearly finished. It has been an exciting week, highlighted by conducting a week's worth of Live Meetings that have been attended by a couple thousand people. If history is any indication, the series of five live meetings will be downloaded many many more times than the actual number of attendees. The topic? Well Windows PowerShell of course.

When doing Live Meetings, the thing that is great is the diversity of the audience. Actually, though, this seems to be the case wherever I go. Several years ago when I was teaching VBScript classes, I would always have a wide variety of people in the class – some who were clearly advanced scripters, and others who were just beginning to see the advantages of automating repetitive processes on their servers. Even when I offered an advanced class, I still ended up with a mixture of people in attendance. This reality from my physical classes, continues into the virtual world as well.

One problem is that scripting in general, and Windows PowerShell in specific, has a broad base of appeal, because it can be used in many different areas of management – or even by normal users. In the Scripting Wife articles, I describe the process that my wife undertook to learn about Windows PowerShell for the Scripting Games – she is a normal user. She enjoyed learning about Windows PowerShell for several reasons. Firstly, it is simply fun to be able to write a little bit of code and have the computer perform advanced operations for you. Secondly, it was able to save her time on several relative tasks that she needed to be able to do. Both of these are worthwhile goals in and of themselves. In Monday's Live meeting, I talked about other reasons for learning Windows PowerShell.

On this coming Monday, I will be speaking at International User Group Day. It will be a tremendous event, and it is something you should not miss. During the presentation I will be talking about resources for learning more about this great technology. Hope to see you there.