Edge Show 52 - Automation with System Center and PowerShell

At [07:35] Symon Perriman meets with Microsoft MVPs & architects Brad Bird (System Center) and Sean Kearney (PowerShell) to talk about automating datacenter management with System Center Orchestrator and PowerShell.

Brad and Sean first give an overview of System Center 2012 SP1 Orchestrator and PowerShell and explain the importance of automation in the datacenter to reduce human error, free resources, and ensure a consistent service experience. They then talk about how Orchestrator can be extended by 3^rd party Integration Packs (such as VMware) and how custom IP can be created. Next they talk about PowerShell extensibility and how it enables automation of any hardware component with a programmatic interface.

At [13:45] the team takes a look at an Orchestrator demo which shows integration between PowerShell, System Center Service Manager, Active Directory, and Outlook to onboard a new user in the company. In this scenario an administrator can send an email to the IT department with an XML attachment which gets parsed by PowerShell, then the user's information gets added to AD and a record is created in Service Manager. This workflow also shows variables and conditional statements as well as the Orchestrator databus, which allows one runbook to invoke and pass data to other workflows.

News:

• [00:15] The Outlook team announces the global consumer launch of Outlook.com, which already has over 60 million users: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2013/02/18/outlook-com-leaves-preview-as-fastest-growing-email-service.aspx     
• [01:30] The free Microsoft iSCSI Target has been updated—download it today to get an easy-to-use SAN: http://aka.ms/iSCSITarget     
• [01:50] Check out the "Future of Communication" from this week's Lync conference, including Skype & Lync      integration: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/02/19/re-humanizing-communications-from-the-living-room-to-the-boardroom.aspx     
• [02:35] Five new courses have been released on the Microsoft Virtual Academy covering System Center 2012 SP1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Intune: https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com     
• [06:10] Sign up for the "Microsoft Tools for VMware Integration & Migration" Jump Start on March 14^th: http://aka.ms/VMtools

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