PowerShell Task Automation Features

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is on researching and demonstrating PowerShell’s capability as a task automation platform. The goal is to define a framework on which to implement, execute, manage and monitor automations and evaluate its capability and usability for automating tasks in the IT field. The fundamental task automation concepts and their corresponding features in PowerShell are introduced with practical use cases and examples. The research focuses on PowerShell’s native capability to identify the most suitable methods for automating tasks on any PowerShell instance. Practical use cases and implementations are introduced to demonstrate the capability of the researched features. Shorter examples are used to present the introduced features. PowerShell offers the most essential features required for automating and managing tasks, but may require some development to avoid repeating similar steps in implementations. Some of the researched features are natively available in PowerShell, but rely on a separate Windows component, which limits their applicability on other operating systems.