Iis – Automating help desk tasks using a Powershell web interface

We use Group Policy for almost everything these days, and we use a single Windows disk image that we deploy to all of our computers. We also have System Center Configuration Manager installed (the newest version of SMS).

Our image contains all of the commonly-used apps in our facility, but we use Group Policy to expose only the apps that the particular user or group of users need to see. This keeps the Start menu and desktop tidy.

SCCM allows one to install and patch software. This can also be done through Group Policy.

For automation tasks, we use PowerShell heavily. It's well worth the effort you'll put into learning it.

We don't allow users to install apps, so we don't need to remove blacklisted applications much, but if we did it could be done through SCCM as well.

This is a pretty general question. Is there anything in particular you need to know more about?

Background jobs can make your workflow asynchronous.

• Convert the wake up function to a script block:

  $WakeUp = {
      ([string] $url)
  
      try {
          # Processing...
      } catch {
          throw $_
      }
  }
  

• For each URL spin up the script block as a background job.

  @(
      "http://app1"
      # More...
  ) | % {
      Start-Job -ScriptBlock $WakeUp -ArgumentList $_
  }
  

Check out my answer from another question to see how you can receive data from the background job and detect which failed.

Update

This addresses the issue in your version about not receiving output. You want to use Wait-Job before Receive-Job to allow them to finish because they are running asynchronously.

$WakeUp = {
    param ([string] $url)
    try {
        Write-Output "Waking up $url ..."
        Start-Sleep -Seconds 3
        if ($url -eq "http://app2/") {
            throw ($url + " failed")
        }
        Write-Output "$url Ok"
    } catch {
        throw $_
    }
}

$jobs = @()
# Run your code that needs to be elevated here
@(
    "http://app1/",
    "http://app2/",
    "http://app3/"
 ) | % { 
    $jobs += Start-Job -ScriptBlock $WakeUp -ArgumentList $_ 
}

Wait-Job -Job $jobs | Out-Null
Receive-Job -Job $jobs -Keep