Administrative Console
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General Information
The PowerGUI Administrative Console (or Admin Console, for short) is an MMC-like management interface that is powered by PowerShell. It consists of a dockable user interface that consists of five main areas, as follows:
- the menu/toolbar
- the navigation pane (also called the navigation tree, on the left side by default)
- the results pane (the middle area where you see data in a grid or an HTML page, plus the PowerShell Script tab)
- the actions pane (on the far right by default)
- the messages pane (at the bottom by default).
Managing your infrastructure using the Administrative Console
The Admin Console is a powerful management user interface that may contain management functionality for many different platforms. Some of the management functionality may require a specific configuration, such as 32-bit or 64-bit PowerShell, single-threaded apartment (STA) or multi-threaded apartment (MTA) mode, etc. Also, the manner in which the data is displayed in the results grid in the Admin Console is predefined with a default configuration but it is completely customizable to allow you to modify it to get the results you are looking for. You can learn more about the various command-line parameters as well as how to navigate the Admin Console user interface and configure it to give you the results you need in the following articles:
PowerPacks
A PowerPack is an add-in for the Admin Console that defines the elements it adds to the UI, display configuration details for those elements, icons, plus all PowerShell scripts that power those elements. The contents shown within each of the five main areas in the Admin Console is defined by the combination of PowerPacks that you have loaded into the Admin Console plus any local customizations you have made on your own. Local customizations may include modifications to a core PowerPack, additional nodes or actions added to your local Admin Console configuration, or additional PowerPacks you have installed. Out of the box, the Admin Console comes with four PowerPacks:
These PowerPacks are not required to use the Admin Console, and when you install the Admin Console you can select which PowerPacks you want installed with it. You can also download additional PowerPacks from the PowerPack Library, including the core PowerPacks if you did not install them with the Admin Console plus many other PowerPacks organized into categories such as Unified Communications, Active Directory, Virtualization, etc., or you can create your own PowerPacks from within the Admin Console itself.
To learn about PowerPacks in more detail, please consult the PowerPack article on this Wiki.
Frequently asked questions
If you have a specific question in mind, you might have luck finding the answer on the Frequently Asked Questions portion of the wiki. You can find the frequently asked questions specific to the Admin Console here:
