Some have said to me that they believe that PowerShell capabilities for SharePoint Online is limited and support is weak, particularly compared to Microsoft's many other products. Microsoft has been on the march for years, investing resources to develop and integrate PowerShell capability within almost every product it produces. It started on-premises and has slowly, but methodically, seeped into the software company's Cloud-based counterparts. Microsoft makes cursory management of its products easy, but if a customer wants deeper and holistic management approach, PowerShell is now the requirement.
Our own Michael T. Smith has been writing up some great counter-articles to the whole "SharePoint doesn't do PowerShell" debate. You can catch some of those here:
So, you see, there is a very good PowerShell story for SharePoint. And, to further boast its PowerShell capabilities, Microsoft recently released a new PowerShell module for managing your SharePoint Online subscription in Office 365. You can use it to manage various SharePoint Online features such as users, sites, site collections, and organizations from the command line, instead of using the SharePoint Administration Center user interface. By utilizing PowerShell, you can automate much of your common administration tasks, and do it in a much faster way. Instead of having to laboriously navigate the Administration Center every time, you just script and save your task to run quickly and efficiently.
The new module comes with over 30 cmdlets and can be downloaded from here: SharePoint Online Management Shell
Over the next few weeks, we'll be digging through some of the cmdlets and providing examples.
