One of my earliest uses of PowerShell was to get information through WMI queries on our Exchange 2003 servers. It worked and gave us the information I needed. Recently I came across a post from Don Jones on reading the PowerShell help files more closely. He's right you should.

The new script seems faster as well. I should probably look at those performance test cmdlets the MVPs all run from time to time to see if it's a real performance kick or subjective.

Compare it to my original code.

Of course, it probably helps if you're a better script writing then I am and have a better understanding of all the jargon you're reading, but this is why I like the blogs, you generally learn something often enough that really helps out later.

There are a lot of blog posts and books about PowerShell and with the blogging about CTP for PowerShell v2 going on, it can get even more confusing. Having succeeded in getting another co-worker seriously interested in PowerShell I sent him one of my recent tutorial finds and dug out an older one from my delicious bookmarks. To make it easier for me to give the links to friends, here are the links to both series. Each has a different approach that provides some significant value.

This applies to LCS 2005sp1 environments but should also work on OCS2007 environments.

The challenge was to generate a list of LCS enabled users that were not disabled. I have a WMI query that will generate a list of LCS users, but I really wanted to be able to filter out the disabled users.

Get-WmiObject msft_sipesusersetting -filter "Enabled = true" | Select-Object DisplayName

As I had some other needs at the time, I added the telephone information as well to the query. Using get-member you can find a number of other different pieces of useful information to gather as well.