Monday, June 21, 2010

Integrating PowerShell and Sharepoint pt. 1

If you follow me on Twitter (@iOnline247), then you have probably noticed me tweeting  a lot about POSH (PowerShell) lately.  When I was first introduced to this language, it was about 4-5 years ago.  At that point, I was knee deep in VB code and building some cool HTA’s.  I figured I should backburner POSH and learn it later.  Fortunately, that time has come.  Unfortunately, it should’ve came sooner…  As I take you through what I’m currently working on, you’ll see why ;-).

I’ll give you an aerial view of my current project.  The setup I’m working with is MSSX, single server deployment; farm, server… Whatever you want to call a single server hosting SharePoint.  A PMA (Project Management Application) was recently rolled out and as I integrate more forms from excel and word, the lists related to the initial project will become bigger and bigger.  I’m expecting about 8 at the end of it all that will support the project’s main information.  With all of these different lists, there will have to be an easy way to purge or archive the information once the project data is stale. 

So what does that mean?  I need to come up with a way that will handle recursive deletes in SharePoint across multiple lists.  It was only natural to turn to POSH to handle a job like this.  The decision makers also want to be able to do this from the browser.  “Wha?”, I replied…  After trolling the net for a day or so, I’m close to setting it all up.

List of tools I’ll be using:

  1. PowerShell v2
  2. iLoveSharepoint PowerActivities v1.2
  3. Idera PowerShell Plus v3.1

I do not accept any compensation from any one of those sources.  As a matter of fact, I owe @cglessner a beer for his help!  He built PowerActivities and was gracious enough to share.  Without him building this, I wouldn’t be able to build my solution whatsoever.  Cheers to Christian!