The February Meeting of the Microsoft Mobility & Messaging User Group was the normal interesting and informative event. It's not just the content of the user group meeting that's informative but the ability to get a view into how other people do things. With these sorts of meetings/seminars people are more likely to be more open about issues and problems they have encountered as well as about practices they follow when confronting problems.

February's MM & M User Group meeting had two very good speakers. The first (Richard Siddaway) concentrated on Powershell and specifically how power shell interacts with Exchange. The demo of using power shell to manipulate both windows and exchange was quite impressive. From what was said it does seem clear that VBScript is going to be depreciated and cmd.exe will go the same way.

Right now, Powershell is limited in what it can do simply because it's not possible for me, sitting at my PC to connect to another machine running powershell and run commands. It IS possible to embed VBScript and batch files into powershell so in theory its possible to use VBScript and WMI as well as DOS tools such as the PS Tools which will extend the functionality of the powershell.
Goning forwards I'm certainly going to try to do more with Powershell. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

The second speaker was James Clifford and this one hour session concentrated on best practices for email security and touched on elements like Microsoft Forefront. The presentation jumped about all over the place but was a hugely enjoyable session thanks to James history and insights into both the Anti-Virus industry and Microsoft. I think the key message for this session was one of how proper planning can prevent a lot of issues with the email environment and I plan to touch on these through more email and security focused future blog articles.