The Painful Truth about PowerShell and SharePoint

The Painful Truth about PowerShell and SharePoint

Yes, you’ve heard all about PowerShell and how it makes working with SharePoint so much easier than the old ‘stsadm’ command line. Sure, you can so some slick things – access the object model, create sites, etc. In fact, it's pretty much a must have for working at the farm level. 

Indirectly, you may wonder why PowerShell (in SharePoint) is being pushed so much and there are really two reasons. First, it’s costly to build user interfaces for all of the potential commands available through the API. Exposing them through the command line is much easier – although, you have to like to type. Secondly, it was a way to help bridge the gap for those Linux and Unix users who can never seem to break the habit of a command line interface.

But for all of the effort to learn it – will you actually be able to use it? For most of us, the sad answer is NO – only the Admin’s will. In a typical production environment, it is rare if not out of the question in allowing developers or other non-administrators any kind of command line access. This goes for Office 365 too. So even if have the best scripts in the world, it will be up to the farm admin to allow them to be used.

I offer this as a word to the wise - in providing instruction and courseware, I’ve begun to downplay a lot of the PowerShell training (for SharePoint anyway). If you’re not going to be an administrator, save your precious learning time – learn a little PowerShell to help you in development but concentrate on solutions instead – your time will be better spent with sandboxed solutions, MVC, jQuery, Javascript and HTML5.