My apologies to all who have been waiting for this.  I was going through my blog site and saw this post had been sitting in draft for quite some time.  I had thought I had posted it a long time ago.  Guess I hadn’t.  My apologies.

So this is a topic I have spoken on a few times.  Basically it’s all about using PowerShell to install SharePoint for you.  Now there already is a tool out there called AutoSPInstaller which is a great tool now that it has an added feature of a GUI interface to build out the xml config.  I would like to think that my scripts are much easier to work with than that.  However, in some ways AutoSPInstaller does more than my scripts in the configuration world, but my scripts do something that AutoSPInstaller won’t.  They will also build out your entire environment, pages, lists, web parts and all.

I did up this presentation not to show off my code or to give it to others (which I have no problem doing), but I actually did it to show everyone just how easy and slick it is to use scripts to complete your work for you.  It also gave me a place to come back and grab bits of code that I could use here and there.  The GUI, while I wouldn’t call clunky, is not the smoothest experience.  And waiting for pages to refresh or having to redo steps because you clicked something you shouldn’t or filled in some incorrect data is a real pain.  This is where scripting comes in.  Yes it takes you longer to build the script, but in the end you save time.  I have reused these scripts many times now.  To give you a comparison, when we deployed these environments, my script configured and built our DEV, TEST and PROD environments (pages, lists, webparts, etc too) in about 30 min for all.

Can your GUI do that for you?

Slide deck attached.