Since the last post on this blog, a lot has happened to me personally and it's time to bring this hiatus to an end. So... I'm still with my same company. I'm still getting more projects that I want to do rather than projects I don't want to do. They're also getting bigger! As I get ready to attend my 3rd TechEd, I'm thinking about where I'm at and where I want to go. My projects are focused around monitoring and beginning to move some of our applications and services to "the cloud". Aside from our continuing Active Directory cleanup, my getting to play with PowerShell has been pretty much limited to helping the other guys on my team when they get stuck. This isn't happening as much as it use to and their problems are getting more interesting, so I must be doing something right. We've had one engineer leave our team and was replaced by someone from our helpdesk. As soon as a local class at Microsoft was available, my boss had him scheduled; no discussion or question except that to ensure that it was the right course.
While at a local SharePoint conference, I heard one of the speakers say something that really resonated with me on how we were looking at SharePoint. I'm paraphrasing; "SharePoint is not the Application, SharePoint is the Platform that you build your Application on." I've realized in trying to explain PowerShell to other people that something similar could be said. PowerShell isn't the Solution; PowerShell is what you build your Solution out of. Most of the scripts I've written are either focused on a single technology (managing AD) or merging data from two systems together (VMware and NetApp).
So as I get ready for TechEd and plan the sessions I'm going to attend. I'm also starting another project to fill a need I have at work that I think will be useful. Most everyone I'm sure either uses or is at least aware of password management software. If you work in a medium to large IT shop, you might even have and enterprise password management solution. A couple of years ago, I started working with one from Thycotic Software called SecretServer. Its an awesome internal web application for managing, auditing, and reporting on secrets. You can store user accounts, credit card information, even digital certificates and launch helper programs from the secret and even let SecretServer manage the changing of the password for you. Over the next few posts, I'll show you how to use SecretServer in your PowerShell scripts for working with passwords, think credential objects, easier.
