Categories
Development

PowerShell, SharePoint, & MS Access – Oh My!

I’ve been getting into PowerShell scripting a lot at one my clients and I encountered a pretty unique situation that I spent days trying to find the answer to.  I figure I would post a quick note about it and see if I could save someone else some time.

PS-SP-Access

The setup:

One of the tasks I have at this client is to put together a weekly Status Report MS Word document for management.  Although I try to keep the information brief, we are running about 7-8 pages in length (we have a lot of  plates spinning at the same time.)  I have to follow up with a dozen people to get their updates.  Although I’ve tried to get them to submit their information in a standardize format, etc, the information comes in wildly different formats, completeness, or lacks context, etc.  The entire process can take a few hours to pull together – depending on the editing required.  I thought that a better use of time was to come up with a SharePoint solution that would allow everyone to contribute their portion of the status report and have an automated weekly report generated automatically for management.

The Issue:

After setting up my SharePoint site/list, creating the MS Access database, and connecting it to said list, automating MS Access from PowerShell as a scheduled task on a server proved to be quite challenging.  There were a number of error messages and access issues that needed to be addressed before everything worked.

Categories
Development

Latest Challenge: SharePoint, jQuery, and Web Services

Back again!

I don’t write as often as I should and with the new year coming up, I’m hoping to change that (again!)

In keeping with what I’ve been blogging about in the past, I decided to write about my latest challenge/adventure. The last few years I’ve been concentrating on Project Management and not really writing a lot of code.  However, PM’ing at my latest client has given me tons of programming opportunities if I want to pitch in and help.  Lots of PowerShell, Exchange, and Active Directory stuff (with some sprinkling of other types of stuff like SharePoint and faxing, etc.)  My latest challenge is creating a dashboard of the data we’ve collected on the Exchange mailboxes.