Want to get to know the faces and personalities behind the names, the questions, the tips, and the scripts? Here's is where we keep our collected profiles of our major participants and high-profile users. Go ahead and find your favorites.
Powergui.org User Profiles
Paul Chavez
Hello, I'm Paul Chavez, I'm from San Diego and I'm addicted to Powershell.
I currently work as a Network Engineer supporting a hosted 24/7 server
environment for my employer's managed service offering.
I have been working as an administrator with Windows technologies since 1998.
At this point I'm best described as a 'jack of all trades' when it comes to Microsoft technologies.
I've touched on everything from end-user desktop support through System Center enterprise management
products with a whole lot in between. Add in networking, software development and enough Linux knowledge
to be dangerous and you'll find I can tell you *something* about *anything*.
Which is why I love Powershell. It is like super-glue in my daily workflow. Or maybe duct tape...
As I started learning Powershell and uncovering everything it works with- .Net, WMI, COM, regex,
Active Directory (thanks Quest!)- I became more and more impressed and found myself using everywhere.
I've since moved into an evangelical phase and spend as much time as possible helping people online
and extolling the wonders of Powershell to my co-workers. I post on PowerGUI.org because long ago
I discovered one of the best ways for me to understand something was to explain it to someone.
In my free time I brew beer, autocross and hang out with my wife and two boys.
Chris Harris
I'm Chris Harris (aka seaJhawk) and I've been working with Windows systems for
over 15 years. I've always been a big proponent of automation and especially
scripting (batch, kix, vbscript, etc.), for reducing effort and minimizing
mistakes.
A few years back, I was a program manager for a little email product code named
E12. We needed a better command line story to help admins automate things so
some of the brilliant folks I worked with were looking at a weirdly named solution
called Monad. I went to see Jeffrey Snover give a talk on his fledgling product.
It's hard to express the level of excitement I experienced that day when I saw what
Monad could do and started envisioning its potential in the IT world.
It's been a few years and while I'm no longer working for the same company, I
still spend a significant amount of time encouraging co-workers, vendors,
complete strangers and even my kids to learn and adopt support for PowerShell
because I honestly believe it can lead to a better product and a better
work-life for IT admins everywhere. PowerGUI has been a great asset in my quest
to teach others about the benefits of PowerShell and in getting my job done
every day. "cheers!" to the PowerGUI team and to Quest for making such a team
possible.
When I'm not working I like to spend time biking, hiking (aka "Run! The mosquitoes are coming!")
and going to Church with my wonderful wife and four boys.
Jonathan Medd
I'm Jonathan Medd from the UK. I've been working with Windows Infrastructure products since 1997, in the last few years mostly around Active Directory and Exchange, and most recently virtualisation with VMware products.
Around 2006, I finally gave in and decided that managing large environments only with GUI tools wasn't doing me any favours and that I needed to get into scripting to manage it much more efficiently. After struggling with VBscript for a few months to improve how I was managing a large Active Directory environment thankfully somebody pointed me in the direction of PowerShell. After initially being a little disappointed at the lack of cmdlet support for Active Directory I found the AD cmdlets provided by Quest and haven't looked back since.
The way I carried out my job was totally transformed, I saved loads of time by automating lots of the tedious administration tasks and also found ways to provide services which hadn't been previously possible.
Whilst not being lucky enough to work with Exchange 2007 and its management built entirely on PowerShell, I decided there must be a way to use PowerShell to work with Exchange 2003 and out of that research came the Exchange 2003 PowerPack for PowerGUI, which won Best PowerPack in the first round of Quest's 2008 scripting competition. You can also find another PowerPack I made for managing WSUS 3.0
I spend a lot of time encouraging IT pros I meet to use Powershell by conversation, presentations at User Groups or via posts on my blog http://jonathanmedd.blogspot.com. I also co-host a regular Powershell podcast which contains info on how to learn PowerShell and what's going on in the PowerShell world -- you can find this at
http://get-scripting.blogspot.com.
I have been working with PowerGUI and AD cmdlets? well, I guess ever since we came up with both of these projects. At that time, PowerShell was something called Monad and was scaring beta customers trying what was known as E12 and we wanted to make their lives easier with what we called project Simulacrum. Fast forward a few years and E12 became Exchange 2007, Monad became PowerShell, Simulacrum became PowerGUI.
I truly believe that PowerGUI and AD cmdlets helped make PowerShell popularity grow much faster than it would have been without these projects and I feel lucky for being a part of the great teams that are working on both of them (and the stuff on the roadmap is even more exciting; so stay tuned! ;)) And by the way when I say teams I include everyone involved in any work on the projects including beta testing and localizing!
In my spare time from PowerGUI and PowerShell, I head the Quest Windows Management new product research and cloud computing efforts (see my related blog at http://CloudEnterprise.info). Most of my other free time gets spent with my kids and family, with occasional traveling, scuba diving, and swing dancing.
Wow, looks like you'll need a lot of time to keep involved in everything I post somewhere.
Kirk Munro, PowerShell MVP
My name is Kirk Munro and I'm a Poshoholic. I'm completely addicted to PowerShell. Since you're reading this on PowerGUI?s Community site, you?ve likely been bitten by that bug too (although maybe not to the same degree). It must be the scripter in me.
I started my career 12 years ago as a software developer, working on a scripting language designed to make the IT administrator's life easier (anyone remember FINAL?), as well as products built on top of that scripting language. Two years ago I returned to those roots with Windows PowerShell. I like it so much that I?ve completely restructured my professional life and now I work exclusively with PowerShell as a member of the PowerGUI team, designing and developing PowerPacks based on community interest and feedback. There?s just nothing quite like it.
I'm also the very proud recipient of the Microsoft MVP award for the past two years for my contributions to the community through presentations, PowerPacks, the Poshoholic blog, and various public forums and newsgroups.
Outside of work I'm an ecoholic and I enjoy spending my time with my family.
Shay Levy, PowerShell MVP
My name is Shay Levy and I'm from Israel. I've been working in IT since 1998 as a System Administrator mostly using Microsoft Server technologies. I started to script HTML pages (JavaScript and ASP) and soon enough I converted Web pages scripting to system scripting using VBScript, writing login scripts, automating desktop deployments etc.
Since the first days when PowerShell was introduced I found myself diving into this new technology and I couldn't stop using it. For quite some time I wondered if one could fall in love with a piece of software... Now I know that that's possible! I wouldn't exaggerate if I say that PowerShell changed my life, literally!
Most of the time I like to hang out in Windows PowerShell newsgroup and related forums (PowerGUI.org is one of my favorites). They provide real world problems where I can help and learn from users alike. In July, 2008 I got my MVP award, needless to say it was a dream come true.
I run a blog at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/ScriptFanatic and I also created a PowerShell browser toolbar. It's a one-stop shop to various PowerShell resources like downloads, webcasts, videos, podcasts and more... Check it out here. In my free time I like diving, photography, snooker, biking and much more.
