Book Image

PowerShell for Office 365

By : Martin Machado
Book Image

PowerShell for Office 365

By: Martin Machado

Overview of this book

While most common administrative tasks are available via the Office 365 admin center, many IT professionals are unaware of the real power that is available to them below the surface. This book aims to educate readers on how learning PowerShell for Offi ce 365 can simplify repetitive and complex administrative tasks, and enable greater control than is available on the surface. The book starts by teaching readers how to access Offi ce 365 through PowerShell and then explains the PowerShell fundamentals required for automating Offi ce 365 tasks. You will then walk through common administrative cmdlets to manage accounts, licensing, and other scenarios such as automating the importing of multiple users,assigning licenses in Office 365, distribution groups, passwords, and so on. Using practical examples, you will learn to enhance your current functionality by working with Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online using PowerShell. Finally, the book will help you effectively manage complex and repetitive tasks (such as license and account management) and build productive reports. By the end of the book, you will have automated major repetitive tasks in Office 365 using PowerShell.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

A brief overview of the SharePoint APIs


While learning SharePoint, you may find alternative solutions using different APIs. Although most will be conceptually useful, some may not be applicable to SharePoint Online. In this section, we will quickly recap what is available and how to leverage it.

The SharePoint web services API

Available since version 1, the SharePoint web services are implemented using SOAP. This protocol is intended for machine-to-machine communication and requires tedious XML message crafting. You can easily identify a web service example as it is hosted under the path /_vti_bin and uses the extension .asmx. The SPServices project offers a JavaScript API that simplifies the use of SharePoint web services. It has many examples and a large community (http://sympmarc.github.io/SPServices/).

Even though web services can used in SharePoint Online, newer APIs are usually easier to use from PowerShell.

The SharePoint server-side API and PowerShell API

The server-side API was the method...