Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of PowerShell scripting, and it’s given me the chance to expand my experience and exposure to best practices. One of the key areas I’ve focused on is logging — something that’s often overlooked but incredibly valuable when troubleshooting or reviewing script performance.

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It has been a while since I last blogged - life has certainly been busy!

Over the past two years I’ve somewhat immersed myself in PowerShell. While I wouldn’t claim to be a PowerShell Guru, my knowledge has substantially grown, thanks in part to splendid collaboration with some exceptional colleagues.

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OK….that title was a bit of a mouthful - but it’s a little difficult to categorise what is essentially a kind of hack!

Recently, I felt it was advisable to start regularly recording my blood pressure results (comes with age I’m afraid).

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I’ve recently being getting deeper into the weeds (so to speak) with Power Automate. Whilst this product clearly isn’t a fully fledged programming model, it does sit very nicely in that “low code” methodology, and can be extremely effective when there is a need to quickly create and perform a specific task.

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Firstly, let me register that I much prefer writing raw SQL when interrogating iSAMS than using the official iSAMS REST API - there, I’ve said it!

However, I do entirely appreciate the necessity for an official API in order to cater for security, consistency, potential database schema changes & futureproofing etc. As such, the need to embrace the iSAMS API is I feel, something of a requirement.

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Like many people, I’ve tinkered with Power BI over the years but have never really dug deep into the weeds; the same can also be said for the iSAMS REST API. So recently I thought why not combine these two systems and see what can be achieved?

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Having fully migrated our on-prem Exchange to Exchange Online, there were a few little gotchas along the way that we had to contend with - which was to be expected.

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It’s not uncommon to receive unwanted emails which have managed to work their way through the array of filtering systems in production.  Recently our organisation received such an email - a classic phishing email sent to multiple end user accounts.

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To be honest, as I’m sure any right-minded individual would agree, downloading videos from YouTube for personal gain is wrong.  However, there are occasions when it is arguably reasonable and possibly even legitimate to do such a thing.

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A common issue with supporting a primarily Windows based user body, is that thanks to the “always on” expectation emboldened by smartphones and tablets, it can be a constant battle to try and encourage end users to restart their computers with some degree of regularity - yes IT friends, you know exactly what I mean!

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