Professional SharePoint 2013 Administration

Chapter 7

Administering SharePoint with Windows PowerShell

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Basic Windows PowerShell usage
• Using common SharePoint 2013 cmdlets
• Working with the SharePoint object model

Windows PowerShell has become the standard by which much of the administration of SharePoint takes place since its introduction in SharePoint 2010. Prior versions of SharePoint relied on the SharePoint administration tool, stsadm.exe, which dealt largely with string input and output in order to get or set any configuration options not already available through Central Administration. There were strong limitations with this, as you were limited to textual input and output of only the configuration options that the tool was designed to access. If you wanted to, say, get a list of site collections in the farm and set a different quota based on some property of each site collection, the path was much more difficult than would be considered acceptable for a toll you would likely only use once or twice.

PowerShell was available to be used in those earlier versions by accessing the SharePoint .NET Application Programming Interface (API) directly, but this remained more in the realm of development than general system administration due to complexity. As of SharePoint 2010, and continued in SharePoint 2013, SharePoint provides a Management Shell, which is essentially a standard PowerShell session with a set of snap-ins pre-loaded to add a number of SharePoint-specific PowerShell cmdlets for interacting ...