Get to Know PowerShell 3.0 with Microsoft MVP and Author Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell has been a boon for our JAMS users and for server administrators worldwide. This month, we’re partnering with Windows IT Pro and Jeffery Hicks to provide a live introduction to the latest version, PowerShell 3.0.

» Register Now (May 22nd, 2:00 PM EDT)

Jeffery HicksPowerShell 3.0 continues to build on the solid foundation of PowerShell 2.0. Today, IT Pros have a set of even more powerful tools to add to their admin toolbox. If you’re wondering about all the fuss surrounding PowerShell 3.0, PowerShell MVP and author Jeffery Hicks will enlighten you. In this session, he will share with you his favorite PowerShell 3.0 commands and demonstrate why you should be managing your environment with PowerShell today.

Following the main presentation, we’ll demonstrate the PowerShell integration in JAMS, including our custom scheduling cmdlets and our PowerShell host.

As with all our community events, registration is free.

MVP Systems Software Debuts at Microsoft Management Summit

IT pro learning about JAMS automation at MMS 2013MVP Systems Software and the JAMS team received an incredibly positive response from attendees at the 2013 Microsoft Management Summit. From the first hours of the Summit, our booth became a gathering place for IT pros seeking out efficient management solutions for Windows-centric environments (though there was noticeable excitement from attendees managing Linux/UNIX and iSeries). Over the course of the event, they shared first-hand stories about the challenges of centralization, mainly around configuring and deploying heterogeneous systems as well as monitoring them in real time. Scheduling and automation were natural follow-on topics as many attendees we met were grappling with the shift of datacenters and related management tasks to public and private cloud environments (e.g. Azure). Maintaining the same standards for security, logging, and alerting as they had on physical servers was top of mind.

Cross-platform automation immediately resonated with the many System Center pros in attendance. Having begun to realize the cost benefits of centralized configuration management and centralized storage management, they quickly understood the business benefit of tying in scheduled tasks from other systems, such as ERP and BI. Scripting and native scheduling tools often helped companies establish basic workflows, but many attendees acknowledged that those setups had shortcomings. They cited logging, auditing and dependency-based automation as key requirements for managing their infrastructure.

Summit attendees saw tremendous value in the integration of JAMS Job Scheduler with SCOM. MVP provides JAMS users with a SCOM Management Pack that monitors components and services. With support for agent tasks and dashboard views, the JAMS Management Pack for SCOM makes resources such as availability, system health, and performance readily available to the teams responsible for the overall health of a company’s IT infrastructure.

For MVP, connecting with the MMS community, including members of Microsoft’s product teams, was extremely relevant. As the momentum around heterogeneous server environments is multiplying, we’re excited to be helping companies with established Windows management systems extend their reach to tasks on other platforms that are equally critical to their business process.

MVP Systems Software Sponsoring New York City Techstravaganza 2013

Techstravaganza 2013On Friday, March 22nd, the JAMS team will be heading down to the third annual New York City Techstravaganza – a successful grassroots conference organized by the New York City PowerShell User Group, the New York Exchange User Group, the NYC SharePoint User Group, the Princeton SharePoint User Group, and the New York Enterprise Windows User Group.

The event promises to be full of interesting sessions on the Microsoft Technologies JAMS users automate every day: PowerShell, SharePoint, Exchange, and Windows.

If you’re planning on attending, let us know or join our mailing list for great educational content about automation on Microsoft platforms.

Still Deploying PowerShell Scripts Manually?

Note: This post was originally published in the February 2013 PowerShell.org TechLetter.

The whole purpose of PowerShell is to automate tasks. So, why are some users still manually deploying scripts? And why are some organizations relying on one or two users to execute critical PowerShell scripts?

The automation of PowerShell scripts is an important step in bringing back-office processes into day-to-day workflows. Defining and scheduling PowerShell jobs in a centralized automation solution means that scripts run in the context of the entire business, not in isolation. They can be run automatically based on a time/date schedule, on a dependency, or on a combination of both. They can also be linked dynamically to processes throughout the enterprise, whether those processes reside on other platforms or on applications, such as ERP systems and BI tools.

Through automation, PowerShell scripts can reach their full potential. Centralized automation of PowerShell addresses issues such as security and auditability as well.

  • Who can run scripts?
  • Who can edit scripts?
  • What variables can be passed to them?
  • When were particular scripts run, and who submitted them?

The enforcement of security standards and the provision of detailed logs prepares PowerShell scripts for enterprise deployment.

JAMS Job Scheduler enables organizations that use PowerShell to leverage scripts in the context of the whole enterprise. It adds cross-platform dependencies, event notifications and security settings essential for broad deployment of mission-critical jobs.

Learn more about enterprise PowerShell automation and custom scheduling cmdlets on our website.

We are Hiring

MVP Systems Software is looking for .NET developers interested in joining one of our talented software teams. If you or someone you know has a passion for shipping great code for enterprise-grade applications, check out our job listing now. No recruiters.

Software Developer »

MVP and JAMS Job Scheduler Team Sponsor Ohio .NET Developers Community

We’ve been avid supporters of the .NET community for years. Tomorrow, we’ll join about 200 developers and IT pros at Indiana Wesleyan University for the Central Ohio Day of .NET. Kudos to organizers James Bender and Matthew Groves for collaborating with regional .NET and SQL Server users groups and for putting together a great lineup of speakers and topics.

MVP Systems Software is a lead sponsor of this event. Visit our table to talk about automation and job scheduling in your .NET app or for a chance to win a free book, Windows PowerShell for Developers by Microsoft MVP Doug Finke.

Are you part of a .NET, PowerShell or SQL user group?

Join our mailing list to learn about upcoming presentations on related server scheduling and automation topics.

Get Started with SAS® Batch Automation in a Cross-Platform World

Centralized Automation for SASWhether you’re a business intelligence (BI) expert or you’re an IT admin responsible for SAS® applications and servers, you are well aware of the value of automation. From data loading and archiving to countless analyses and reports, SAS requires constant technical attention. Organizations make significant decisions based on SAS data, often in real-time, so it’s important that every process run like clockwork.

SAS does have some native scheduling tools and add-ons, but like many native tools, they focus on automating only the “application in front of you”. While these tools can get the average job done, they don’t address larger issues such as:

“How do I trigger SAS jobs based on other applications our BI team uses?”

“How can I automatically deliver and archive the reports we generate with SAS?”

“How can I collect and import data files from disparate sources without tying up staff?”

“This is confidential data. How do I make sure it’s secure as it moves in and out of SAS?”

Reliable, secure standards for job scheduling and automation can be applied to SAS processes, just as they have been to ERP, database, CRM and server processes. By applying these standards from the start and integrating SAS with a centralized batch automation solution, you enable your team to focus on business intelligence, rather than burdening them with administrative tasks and workarounds to keep SAS data moving efficiently.

Ready to Get Started?

Download Our Free White Paper “Centralized Automation for SAS®”

This free guide will introduce you to:

  • Integration of SAS tasks with other business applications
  • Automated reporting and report delivery
  • Detailed status alerts and notifications by email, voice or text

Download Now

MVP Customer Ohio Department of Public Safety Saves Millions with Legacy Modernization

Cover of Exodus ProjectThe Ohio Department of Public Safety’s transition from the mainframe offers valuable insight into the benefits of legacy modernization. The lessons learned apply broadly to IT pros, but are especially relevant to those who rely on well-architected automation and scheduling in a mainframe environment.

The challenge of creating a “Windows-based environment that met or exceeded the standards that were established by the mainframe….was a tall order given that mainframes were designed exactly for the type of environment running at Public Safety: high volume, high demand, and large batch processing,” notes the report. If you have automated with JCL or JES2, you are aware of the sacrifices and workarounds a move to Windows Task Scheduler requires. An enterprise job scheduling solution, such as JAMS Job Scheduler, provides the environment needed to maintain the rigorous and dependable automation systems that have often served mainframe-based organizations for decades.

“Plus, with more than 2,000 programs running on it, hundreds of integration points, over 30 million letters being successfully generated annually, and a massive batch process, there was no compelling operational deficiency or problem to force a move from the mainframe.”

Proven Savings with Reliable Batch Processing Preserved

Following its 3-year investment in the process, Public Safety is on track to save the citizens of Ohio “$7M-10M during the next five years.” Notably, the successful migration includes “400 batch jobs and integration with 2,500 contributing entities”.

Cost savings like these validate the investment in distributed computing and legacy modernization, but not without enterprise-quality batch automation solutions ready to deliver once the core code and applications have been migrated.

Read the full report on the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s Exodus Project or learn more about legacy modernization initiatives with JAMS.

JAMS and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

JAMS Job Scheduler now utilizes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) which makes it easier than ever to expose a web service in the context of an automated IT environment.

Microsoft .NET WCF Logo

Pushing to and Pulling from Web Services

JAMS can help integrate web services via PowerShell or Workflow. A PowerShell job can use the New-WebServiceProxy cmdlet to create a proxy for any web service; then it can use that proxy to call the web service. Here’s a simple two line example:

$ws = New-WebServiceProxy -uri http://wsf.cdyne.com/WeatherWS/Weather.asmx?wsdl
$ws.GetCityWeatherByZip({zip}) | out-default

You can see that it is easy to use PowerShell to pull data or send data via a web service.

However, it can be somewhat challenging to expose a web service with only PowerShell. It can be done but, it wouldn’t be a simple two-liner. For exposing web services, you should look to Workflow.

Exposing Web Services

A JAMS job that uses the Workflow execution method can both consume web services AND expose web services. It does so by using two built-in activities:

1. Send, which calls a web service, and
2. Receive, which exposes a web service and waits for a client to call it.

JAMS makes web services more reliable and scalable, too. It’s easy to expose a web service through IIS but, problems can arise if the processing behind the web service is complex in any way. In many cases, it makes more sense to have the web service just submit a JAMS job to do the actual processing. Then you have granular control of the processing. You can throttle the number of concurrent executions, retry on failure, load balance, send a notification, etc.

JAMS will also work well with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). An ESB might handle the initial routing of a message and determine whether or not the message should be passed to a JAMS job for further processing. Our .NET Class library and the Submit class makes that easy.

Redmond Connections: MVP at Microsoft

TechMentor 2012 backpackLast week we visited Microsoft HQ to exhibit and present at TechMentor 2012. Though smaller than the typical TechMentor conference, it afforded us an opportunity to connect with an exclusive group of IT pros who were focused on bringing about significant change in their organizations.

PowerShell remains one of the most important concepts/topics. We saw it before at TechEd, and we saw it again in Redmond. Part of the push to adopt PowerShell comes from Microsoft, of course. However, there is also genuine passion and curiosity around PowerShell. Developers and IT operations managers (DevOps, too) value the powerful system level control it provides, though skill level varies widely. Fortunately, advocates like Ashley McGlone and Don Jones were on hand to lead participants through their exploration of PowerShell and its potential to improve various IT processes.

We had the pleasure of meeting with Travis Jones the program manager for PowerShell. Between the new features in PowerShell V3 and its tight integration with JAMS we saw great opportunities for IT environments that combine the two.

We were discouraged to hear that in this day and age, many PowerShell users still haven’t found a way to contain and schedule their scripts, even with Windows Task Scheduler. IT departments are still saving and managing scripts in notepad, then copying and pasting them into the command line to run. And, when it comes to notifications about the status of scripts, Task Scheduler and SQL Agent users complain that they still don’t get a notification when a job runs too long or runs too quickly, common indicators of a problem.

Though the main content was focused on technology, attendees paid close attention to the business benefits of the ideas, frameworks and applications presented to them.

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