Here is a special guest blog by Mike F Robbins. Mike F Robbins is a Windows PowerShell enthusiast, IT pro, winner of the advanced category in the 2013 scripting games, and contributing author of a chapter in the PowerShell Deep Dives book. Mike blogs at http://mikefrobbins.com and can be found on twitter @mikefrobbins During the past two years, I’ve competed in the Scripting Games and during that time I compiled a massive list of Windows PowerShell best practices and lessons that I learned along the way. This Saturday, October 26^th is your opportunity to hear me present a session based on this information at PowerShell Saturday 005 in Atlanta: http://powershellsaturday.com/005/. In addition to my session, there are over a dozen well known speakers in the PowerShell community who are scheduled to present sessions in three different tracks, each at different expertise levels so whether you’re an absolute beginner or someone with years of experience, this is an awesome technology event that you can’t afford to miss! Learning Windows PowerShell is a necessity because the days of having servers with a graphical user interface are just about over. Even if you do have a GUI on your servers, you shouldn’t be logging into them to perform administrative tasks and who really wants to point and click performing the same task all day, every day when you can simply script it? Don’t wait until your employer decides to budget training dollars and time for you to learn Windows PowerShell, take control of your career by taking the initiative and attending free and/or low cost technology events such as PowerShell Saturdays. If there aren’t any of these types of technology events in your area, consider local user groups, and if there aren’t any local user groups in your area, there are a number of user groups that either meet online or have their physical meetings available virtually as well. The Mississippi PowerShell User Group, which I’m the leader and co-founder of, is one of these user groups: http://mspsug.com/. Even though you may not receive immediate recognition for your efforts, management and your peers are paying more attention to your actions than you might think. During my yearly evaluation this past year at the place where I’m employed, my manager who is the Director of IT brought up the subject of scripting and specifically Windows PowerShell. I was kind of surprised that he noticed, although he does have a Linux background and those guys have been scripting forever. He stated that he really liked the Windows PowerShell stuff I’d been doing at work as well as what he’d seen me doing for user groups and the different events that I’ve presented at. He said he wanted to see more of it because he felt that our company couldn’t keep growing at the rate it had been from an information technology standpoint with our current staffing levels unless we took advantage of scripting processes that were currently being done manually in the GUI. He also suggested that maybe I could start presenting some of my sessions as lunch and learns for our internal staff.

That’s all the time I have for now, it’s time for me to put the final tweaks on my presentation based on the feedback I received from presenting it at PowerShell Saturday in Singapore a couple of weeks ago. Keep in mind that there are only a limited number of tickets available for PowerShell Saturday 005 in Atlanta: http://powershellsaturday.com/005/ and at this point there are only a few of those tickets left so don’t delay in signing up!