Improving PowerShell with 3rd party Modules

PowerShell is an awesome product with amazing potential. But as we al know, the product team can not do everything and neither can the various product teams at Microsoft. As has been quite evident since Monad first peeked it’s head outside Redmond, the community can provide a lot of great extra functionality. Some an alternative to MS produced code (e.g. the Quest AD cmdlets), while other add-ons add features not available elsewhere.

These add-ons are typically, at least since V2, wrapped up in a module and the module then published somewhere. Finding these modules can be quite a chore as they are scattered all over the Interweb! The Microsoft Script Gallery project has quite a few add-on modules published in their archives.

Here’s a set of the most popular modules published at the Microsoft Script Centre:

File System Security PowerShell Module 2.1.
Allows a much easier management of permissions on files and folders using PowerShell. Download this module at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/1abd77a5-9c0b-4a2b-acef-90dbb2b84e85.

Local Account Management Module 2.1
This module allows managing local groups and user accounts, local group membership and some other useful tasks. It is mostly based on the .net classes in System.Dir. Download this module at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Local-Account-Management-a777191b

Active Directory Replication PowerShell Module 2.01
Managing Active Directory Sites, Site Links and Subnets very easily with PowerShell. Also checking the Active Directory Replication is easy and richer than repadmin.exe, the cmdlets in this module do return objects and not just text. So no more boring test parsing. Download at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/780a2272-06f9-4895-827e-9f56bc9272c4

DHCPAlternateConfiguration PowerShell Module
The DHCP Alternate Configuration module is a command line interface for managing the DHCP client alternate configuration as described. Download at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/DHCPAlternateConfiguration-90e92431

Kerberos Module
The module gives access to the Kerberos ticket cache. It can read and purge tickets of the current logon session. Download from: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Keberos-Module-3a6ab12a

Windows Update PowerShell Module
The PSWindowsUpdate module helps you manage Windows Update on a computer system running Windows. Whole module contain 9 function to check, download and install updates from PowerShell. Download at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/2d191bcd-3308-4edd-9de2-88dff796b0bc

Registry Security PowerShell
Allows a much easier management of permissions inside the registry database using PowerShell. Download at: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/ce4c51a1-43df-42df-bbd1-c2ad0249a864

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