Pointandclick management has long been the stereotype of Windows administration. While it has always been possible to manage portions of Windows (or other applications) through the command line, support usually comes as an afterthought. Once all the administration support has been added to the user interface, the developers of an application might quickly cobble together a COM API or commandline tool if you are lucky. If you aren’t lucky, they might decide only to publish some registry key settings, or perhaps nothing at all.
This inequality comes almost naturally from implementing a management model as an afterthought: with a fully functional user interface complete, very few application developers deem fully functional scriptable administration to be a high priority.
And then there’s Exchange 2007.
In contrast to those who cobble together a management model only after completing the user interface, the Exchange 2007 team wrote their management infrastructure first. In Exchange 2007, it’s not only a firstclass feature—it’s a way of life. Exchange 2007 includes nearly 400 cmdlets to let you manage Exchange systems. Not only is the magnitude stunning, but its breadth and depth is as well. To guarantee full coverage by way of PowerShell cmdlets, the Exchange Management Console user interface builds itself completely on top of PowerShell cmdlets.
Any command that affects the Exchange environment does so through one of the included Exchange Management cmdlets.
The benefit of this model is immense. It doesn’t matter whether you are working with users, groups, mailboxes, or anything else in Exchange: you can automate it all.
