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Now you may be wondering, why does all of this matter?

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Why should you be investing your time and energy into learning PowerShell?

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The answer to those questions have changed a bit over time,

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but with PowerShell 7, the long‑term goal is for you to be able to

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manage anything from anywhere on any platform.

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It doesn't matter if what you have to manage is in the basement data center or

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in the cloud. PowerShell makes it easy to manage at scale.

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If you can use PowerShell to set up one new Active Directory

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user account or one virtual machine in AWS,

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it should be just as easy to do it for 10, 100, or 1000. PowerShell

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gives you the option to manage things interactively. Although, I

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expect many of you will move quickly to build scripted solutions that

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can be automated. PowerShell should also make it easier so that once

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you learn the tool set, you can run it anywhere.

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Today you're on the Windows desktop,

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but tomorrow you're moving to a Mac. Microsoft doesn't

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want you to have to start all over.

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Of course,

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we're not at this utopian stage yet, there's certainly much more work

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to go, but there is a vision. With all of the current emphasis and

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interest in automation, PowerShell should be considered one of the

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primary automation languages.

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It's not the only one, but probably a good one to start with.

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PowerShell makes it easy to create scripts, and scripting,

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as I've said, provides consistency.

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You don't have to worry about forgetting some steps or mistyping a command.

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I'd also argue that if you've built the proper automation tools, the

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scripts themselves can also serve as documentation.

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Now everyone knows the process for provisioning a new user

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account or standing up a new SharePoint server.

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And automation through scripting provides efficiency.

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I once heard of an Active Directory administrator who was very content to

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manually create new user accounts one at a time in the GUI.

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He was in no hurry to learn anything new.

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Apparently his boss didn't care either.

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But I know that in the 5 minutes it might take him to create a single

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user using Active Directory Users and Computers,

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that GUI tool, I could create 100 accounts in even less time through PowerShell.

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Here's another example.

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What you see here is an old DOS command that's going to query a list

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of servers for the status of the BITS service.

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My list has 100 servers, and I'm going to go ahead and run it.

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And this command took 10 minutes to run.

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And let's not even think about how long it would take for you to do

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this manually with GUI‑based tools. Again, all I'm showing you here is

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kind of an old school approach to what we used to have to do as IT

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pros. Now compare that to a few interactive PowerShell commands using

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the same list of servers.

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This time it only took me 27 seconds.

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Now,

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certainly there are other PowerShell ways and commands I

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could use for that same list of servers in order to get the

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information, but this is one way, 27 seconds,

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obviously a whole lot faster than 10 minutes.

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And if I needed to build a report,

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say from the command output, it'd be super easy to

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run a few more PowerShell commands.

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The bottom line is you need to learn PowerShell because it is the

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language of the cloud and the modern data center.

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Even if your company isn't doing Azure or AWS today, maybe they will

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tomorrow, or maybe your next job has you managing Office 365 tenant. Learning PowerShell future‑proofs your career.