This is to take advantage of PowerShell MVP, and all round scripting good guy Don Jones being in town. Don is on holiday on the east coast and he has kindly agreed to be hi-jacked on Thursday night to present a session for the User Group.

So, our agenda currently looks like this:

17:30 17:40 Introduction
17:40 – 18:00 Jeff Alexander – Windows PowerShell integration with Group policy in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
18:00 – 18:20 Adam Bell – Managing MDT 2010 with PowerShell
18:20 – 18:40 Don Jones – What You Should Care About in PowerShell v2
18:40 – 19:00 Q&A and informal chat amongst the group

Jeff, is actually in Canberra on Thursday so he’ll be taking advantage of Live Meeting to join us (details to follow).

Keep an eye on the UG website for details and please join us either online or in person if you’re in Sydney!

Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict at Microsoft Perth, we had moved our meeting from the end of November, to the beginning of December which inadvertantly caused a conflict with the .NET Community of Practice UG. This was a shame as there were a few members from the .NET UG who were keen to attend. In future we’re aiming for week 3 each month, which should prevent this happening.

Anyway, what made this a fun evening was that we had three presenters, all from different locations: Jame’s O’Neill (Microsoft Evangelist UK) from the UK, Shane Hoey (PowerShell User Group Australia), from Brisbane, and myself from Perth.

We had a modest turn out in the Microsoft Office’s in Perth as well as a few people logged into Live Meeting. We had a few technical issues, which is to be expected from a UG still finding it’s feet! Though nothing like the running battles Richard Siddaway used to have when I was in the UK!

Apparently editing the Live Meeting media file to clean it up results in an exponential increase in the files size. Seeing as it’s being made availble over the net it would seem like a good idea to keep it as small as possible, so I’ve take Marco Shaw’s advise and will make it available live, raw and unedited.

PowerShell User Group Australia – November 2009 Session

A summary of the session:

Adam Bell – Introductions (0m – 1m)
Adam Bell – 10 useful PowerShell Tricks (5m 5s – 26m)
James O’Neill – Managing Hyper-V (35m 50s -1h 32m)
Shane Hoey – Windows 7 PowerPack (1h 09m 25s – 1h 30m 05s)

Okay. We experienced a few issues, learnt a few things (like my wireless mike sleeping when not being used!) so the recording is a little raw. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see past that and find something in there that was interesting.

I’ve had a couple of requests so I’ll post my presentation up as a session in a few days and detail my demo’s.

Since returning home I’ve really missed the community and interest around PowerShell. After talking to some of the Microsoft cool cats on the east coast, I’ve organised to commence the PSUGAU.

The idea is to give the group a national focus rather than just solely Perth IT geeks. We hope to achieve this by utilising Live Meeting to give anyone interested the opportunity to join us online. This will also allow me to invite PowerShell guest presenters to help mix things up and bring in some great experience from the wider community.

I’m still in the process of working out where we can host the user group, and I’m trying to get the website operational (watch this space), but the intention is to have the inaugural meeting around the end of September.

If you’re interested in coming along and getting involved then ping me an email so I know how much pizza to order! There’s also a poll on the front page to get an indication on your meeting preferences.