Everyday Powershell - Part 1 - Scheduling Scripts

This is the first part in a series about Powershell. You may have heard about how awesome Powershell is but have struggled to find ways to make it useful in your day to day work. That's what this series is going to address. It'll provide scripts and knowledge to address practical everyday problems! 

In order to really see the power of the shell you must experience what it can do for automation. To do that we'll have to setup a windows scheduled task.

First this is to make sure Powershell will run your script (set-executionpolicy remotesigned) this sets your execution policy to allow local scripts to run. But prevents remote scripts.

So to the actual work you need a scheduled task... you know how to do those right? Of course you do! You wouldn't be looking at a scripting blog if you didn't know that. (If you don't know and would like to, add a comment below and we'll make sure to do a post about that.)

On Server 2003 you can hand it one command with the powershell.exe and the script as an argument;

C:\WINDOWS\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -PSConsoleFile "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\bin\exshell.psc1" -command "& 'C:\scripts\MAHSCRIPT.ps1'" 

Set start in to;

C:\WINDOWS\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0

On Server 2008 you want to select the Action "start a program"
You'll get a box for the Program/Script;

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

Then Add Arguments

-command "& 'C:\scripts\MAHSCRIPT.ps1' " 

Things to watch out for will be the credentials that the script will run as. Make sure it'll have access to whatever it needs. I usually test the script "Run As" the same account I'm planning to use in the scheduled task, just to be sure it won't break.

So the next thing you'll need is some kind of script to run everyday, if you don't have one tune in for the next post and I'll provide you with something awesome to run everyday!