7 PowerShell Automation Ideas to Create Today!

By now, you have gotten to the stage that you realize how powerful PowerShell can be. It may have been when you unlocked your first Active Directory account with the one-liner Unlock-ADAccount -Identity User

Indeed, you may have even written your first PowerShell function to automate a task! At this stage, you are excited to leverage this new found tool but are unsure of where to begin or what to even automate. The common piece of advice provided is to automate the tasks you do every day. In my opinion, this is the end goal.

With that said, I think it beneficial to have a list of ideas to get the creative juices flowing.

While not in any particular order, these may prove to be beneficial to create today as an IT professional:

1. Onboarding new Employees
2. Offboarding departing Employees
3. Send a text message/email on password expiration
4. Send a text message/email on account lockout
5. Create/update outlook signatures upon User login
6. A task that you perform daily. For example, at my work we have a time and billing system where we have to release our time daily. I have a PowerShell Script that sends me an email when I have unreleased time to submit my time before the deadline.
7. Application deployments
8. (Bonus) Phonetic spelling of a word (e.g. “Hi” becomes “H - Hotel, i - India”). If you do phone support, your life just got easier!

In the end, yes the best advice is to automate anything that is a daily/weekly/monthly repeated task. Automate items that are continuously done incorrectly. Automate simple things to learn how to automate complex things.

PowerShell and automation in general will be game changer in your life, career, and professional growth. I encourage you to get started today!