SPJourney

Useful video.

So, you have edited your PowerShell profile, saved the changes, but you cannot use the new alias you just created.  How do you save the changes without re-launching PowerShell?  Source your profile. 

. $profile

I use PowerShell pretty heavily for my administrator tasks.  However, there is one stsadm command that does not have a PowerShell equivalent - at least to my satisfaction.  Stsadm -enumsites.  This command allows you to pipe out a list of site collections in your farm to an XML file.  From there, I open in Excel and I have a nice table with all my site collections - very useful.  

Well, what if you want to run this stsadm command via a PowerShell script.  No problem.  

First edit your profile to create an alias for stsadm, so PowerShell knows where to find stsadm.exe:

psedit $profile (PowerShell ISE)

notepad $profile (PowerShell)

Set-Alias -Name stsadm -Value $env:CommonProgramFiles”\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\BIN\STSADM.EXE”

I wanted to capture items from Eventvwr with the level Warning, Error, and Critical.  No problem.  Get-EventLog can return these items.  Wait! Not all of them.  Get-EventLog does not return the Critical items.  Well, that's the most important one!  It turns out Get-WinEvent will give you what you need, including items flagged Critical.  Export to CSV, open in Excel, create a pivot table and you are all set.  Beautiful.

This is the easiest way I've found.  View the HTML source of the page and search for SiteTemplateID.  Very easy. 

This is one of those cmdlets that makes your life a lot easier.  Rather than logging in on each server to search for a correlation ID, just use this cmdlet.  It searches the logs on each server and returns those items relevant to the parameter you used.  In the case below, the correlation ID. Merge-SpLogFile -StartTime "10/22/2014 9:49 AM" -EndTime "10/22/2014 9:57 AM" -Path D:\UPA.log -Correlation ID