James has an excellent post - http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2009/11/02/you-can-t-be-a-21st-century-admin-without-powershell.aspx – explaining why PowerShell is going to be a must have skill for IT admins going forward.

As far as I am concerned he is preaching to the choir :)

But he has a very valid point. PowerShell is the Microsoft automation tool that will be built into all major products. Eventually we can expect administrative GUIs to be layered over PowerShell cmdlets and expose the commands they are running when we execute a command. This is the pattern established by the Exchange team.

James follows with a list of Microsoft products that already contain PowerShell – BTW SQL Server 2008 uses PowerShell v1 already we don’t need to wait for SQL 2008 R2 for PowerShell support.

What makes the PowerShell story even more compelling is the third party companies that are adopting PowerShell:-

Quest, Special Operations Software, IBM, Symantec, F1, Citrix, VMware

that I can think of immediately.

This makes PowerShell a tool that will be everywhere in a Microsoft environment.

The new features in PowerShell v2 – especially remoting and background jobs – make the case even more compelling for the admin of the future.

Of course the question now is how can I learn PowerShell – plus I don’t have time to automate.

Make the time the rewards are many.

Will the title come true? Probably not but if you want to do more than spend your day clicking on the GUI – learn PowerShell.