Starting to play with SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets

Hello,

As you may know, SharePoint 2010 ships with Windows PowerShell. Being an automation geek, passionate by process, services and tools, I began to have a look at the INCREDIBLE possibilities brought by this architectural choice.

To start, I just retrieved the available cmdlets from SharePoint cmdlets:

• Launch SharePoint 2010 Management Shell
• 
• Type Get-Command –PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
• you just read them

Now, funnier: have an idea of types and totals of them, just to evaluate the upcoming task of knowing, using and documenting them :

• Type the same command, but pipe the output to a TXT file
• Get-Command -pssnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell | Format-Table Name > SP2010cmdlets.txt
• 
• Now Open the TXT file with Excel (2010 of course :-) ), and rework it as follows:
  1. Remove the useless spaces characters with =TRIM() function
  2. Create an “Action Type” column with =LEFT(A2”,SEARCH("-",A2)-1) – my cmdlets starts in the A2 cell
  3. Insert a Pivot Table to count per “Action type” and there you are:

     Cmdlet Type	Count
     Get	143
     Set	110
     New	93
     Remove	80
     Update	11
     Install	10
     Add	10
     Uninstall	8
     Import	8
     Start	8
     Export	8
     Disable	7
     Enable	6
     Clear	6
     Stop	5
     Move	4
     Initialize	3
     Upgrade	3
     Backup	3
     Restore	3
     Resume	2
     Test	2
     Suspend	2
     Mount	2
     Revoke	2
     Grant	2
     Dismount	2
     Unpublish	1
     Copy	1
     Restart	1
     Receive	1
     Merge	1
     Disconnect	1
     Rename	1
     Publish	1
     Connect	1
     Ping	1
     Grand Total	553

553 cmdlets to know, use, document ….

Btw, you can save the Excel file.

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Comments

• Anonymous
  November 26, 2009
  You could also make PowerShell do all the hard work: Get-Command -pssnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell | Group-Object Verb | Sort-Object Count -Descending No Excel required :)