Oct 11

Written by: Don Jones
10/11/2007 8:16 AM 

Welcome!

I'm extremely proud to be the first Community Director of PowerShellCommunity.org and its parent organization, the PowerShell Business League. Over the next few blog posts, I'll be explaining more about what this community is for, what features we offer to PowerShell users, and why I think this is the best darn place on the Web to learn about PowerShell, whether you're an IT Pro or a software developer.

First, though, I want to take a moment and explain how and why the community and its parent organization are structured. Many of you probably have a Chamber of Commerce in your local community; the purpose of a Chamber is generally to help various businesses - even those that compete with one another - work together to help achieve common goals. Chambers will often support legislation that's beneficial to their members, provide common services like health insurance plans, and provide education that helps generally improve the situation for every business in the local community.

That's more or less why the companies sponsoring this community became involved. Sure, they get to have their logo at the bottom of the page, but more importantly they all recognize how important PowerShell is going to become over the next few years, and they want to help educate IT professionals and software developers in using and developing for the shell. That's a benefit to everyone: The better PowerShell does as a product, the easier all our jobs will be, and the better all these businesses will do. You'll notice that even though some of our sponsors are mutual competitors in business, they've still teamed up here to provide a central, independent community.

I hope you'll join me in participating, and in inviting others to do so. If you run across a PowerShell blog, let the author know that we'd love to host that blog here, for free. If you run across a repository of scripts, let the owner know that we've got a free place for them to live here, as well. If you find some news or events related to Windows PowerShell, submit it in the appropriate section of the community so that everyone knows about it. Tell your colleagues and coworkers to sign up, and to visit this site often for the latest in PowerShell news.

Together, we can create something that PowerShell's predecessor technologies - VBScript and so forth - never really had: A strong, central community that "owns" PowerShell - not in the legal sense, but in the sense that we've made it our tool of choice.

Cheers!
Don Jones