back to article PowerShell for Office 365 powers on

Microsoft has powered on PowerShell for Office 365. Redmond promised the tool back at its Ignite conference, and on Tuesday decided all was ready to take it into production. Anyone familiar with PowerShell probably won't be in the slightest bit shocked by the tool, which offers a command line interface with which one can …

  1. Captain Underpants

    Uhh...wasn't it already available?

    PowerShell for Office365 has been around for a good while - see here for example (breadcrumb suggests it dates back to 2012).

    I've no doubt they're expanding it, but that's probably to be expected given there's a new PowerShell release coming with Windows 10 (the preview builds claim to have version 5).

  2. Paul O

    Umm, how's this new? I've been managing ~45,000 users (we're a university) using exclusively powershell for at least 3 years now.

    1. jsnover [MSFT]

      Howdy Paul!

      I would love to connect with you and your team to find out how things are going using PowerShell and get your view on what improvements we could make that would have maximal impact. If that works for you, please email me at jsnover@microsoft.com

      Thanks!

      Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

      Distinguished Engineer and Lead Architect Enterprise Cloud Group

  3. batfastad

    News?

    We migrated from on-premise Exchange to Office365 about 18 months ago (turning off our old Exchange server was a magical moment). We've got all manner of PowerShell commands for setting up new mailboxes, importing, exporting, allocating licenses etc. Are you sure this is new?

  4. Curious

    It's this informational website about powershell that is new.

    Yeah, powershell for office 365 has been essential since the start to do even basic things like creating a transport rule to block exe, scr executable attachments; mailbox statistics etc,.as the ECP web ui is way way way too limited.

    The announcement is for this http://powershell.office.com/get-started website to get people started with this setup.

    1. Captain Underpants

      Re: It's this informational website about powershell that is new.

      @Curious - That sounds about right, it would more or less tie in with the way that MS have been (clumsily) moving a load of the Office365 support docs from Technet onto support.office.com.

      On which note, their abject failure to enable any kind of link rerouting for said move is really annoying. Thanks MS, what I really want with that sort of thing is to land on a now-useless Technet page telling me to go to support.office.com, where I then have to figure out what variation of the original title the actual article is now listed under.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Web-based CLI is yours for the scripting

    PowerShell has been around for ages. Not sure how long the Office365 specific PowerShell cmdlets have been around but long enough to make this article old news if that is what it is referring to.

    The sub-title of this article, "Web-based CLI is yours for the scripting", is a little misleading as I originally though that MS had built web-based terminal for PowerShell within the Office365 Admin portal. As the article mentions you really have jump through hoops to get the standard Windows OS/PowerTools working with Office365 or Exchange Online given the number of dependencies.

    While PowerTools is a powerful tool for administrators there are some really basic tasks that should be achievable via the web interface/Office365 portal. My old mail server had the ability to delete a user and move their mailbox to another users mailbox via the GUI and the task would be done within a minute of committing to that action. As far as I can see trying to do the same thing on Exchange or Office 365 requires copying the mailbox using PowerTools which isn't pretty and the time it takes to move that data from one mailbox to another can be lengthy depending on the size of the mailbox.

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