PowerShell Remoting through Group Policy

This is a couple of months old, but it certainly flew under the radar for me. Special Operations Software has released a tool that combines Group Policy and PowerShell, allowing administrators to push PS scripts to all desktops in their organization. This has a lot of potential to standardize and simplify what we often see out in the marketplace: a Frankensteinian tangle of KiX, VBScript, and Batch scripts running at login and at other times during user startup and shutdown.

I’m definitely going to be exploring this as a solution for my clients. And, as PowerShell emerges as the One Shell to Rule them All, I find myself thinking that it will be nice to recommend conversion and standardization on this remarkable scripting platform. By enabling us to run PS scripts as part of Group Policy, the possibilities become endless for per-user, per-department or per-location scripting. Automation is cool, and never gets any less cool, IMHO. Automation with structure, and controllable through an interface such as Group Policy is even cooler.

From the SpecOps website:

Windows PowerShell is a wonderful new technology making it possible to use scripts to do mostly anything on a machine. Group Policy is also a great technology making it possible to do a lot of changes to many machines at any time.

What we have done at Special Operations Software is combine the two technologies, but added a ton of new functionality to PowerShell remoting such as instant feedback, reporting, scheduling etc.

With Specops Command, we take PowerShell scripting to every desktop and server in your network as well as making PowerShell scripting even more powerful and easier to manage. We give you the potential to do ANYTHING you can do with Windows PowerShell and do it on each computer in your entire network, just with a couple of mouse clicks. And even better, if you know how to write PowerShell scripts and cmdlets, you can extend Specops Command yourself!

And for you old-school VBScripters (I’m one of them, but I’m trying to change) – it supports those too, so you can take withdrawal at your own pace. 😉

PowerShell Remoting with Group Policy at Special Operations Software