Diving Deep into PowerShell and Leisure with Kasper Larsen

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we're going to be focusing on PowerShell and SharePoint Premium from an absolute expert in the space. Today's guest is from Denmark. He works as a Microsoft M365 MVP and Senior Solution Architect. He has been in IT since 2000 and has been working with SharePoint since 2007. He's frequently contributed to PMP script samples and PMP modern search. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode.

Mark Smith: 1:20
Welcome to the show, kasper. Thank you, nice to see you, good to have you on the show, and I love the topic we're going to discuss today, which is particularly PowerShell, because I feel and I've felt it for some time it's kind of a secret tool set, and when I say secret, it's not enough. People know about how awesome it is and how flexible it is and what you can achieve using PowerShell, and so I'm keen to get your experience there. Before we jump into that, though, tell me a bit about food, family and fun.

Kasper Larsen: 1:54
Oh, those are my favorite topics.

Mark Smith: 1:56
Yeah, well food.

Kasper Larsen: 1:58
I'm mostly into Mediterranean food. I love anything from Spain, italy, greece, turkey as well, lebanese food as well. That's just my kind of food. But then again I also like more oriental foods, like Thai, for instance. The only thing I don't like really, that's lemongrass.

Mark Smith: 2:18
I don't know why, but everything with lemongrass in it is just not for me but everything else, basically Family.

Kasper Larsen: 2:26
I have grown up kids. They have left the home several years ago and I became a granddad. My daughter provided me with a granddaughter here in late February, and my son, who's a bit younger, just moved from Bleda, which is in the southern part of the Netherlands, to Portsmouth in an internship. He hasn't learned anything from his dad. He's also going into IT business, but he's going to be a game developer Nice. That might be a little more fun than figuring out for SharePoint teams and groups and stuff.

Mark Smith: 3:04
Now you are in Denmark, though, right, yeah. Yeah, you mentioned Netherlands and I was like did I get my countries wrong? But okay, see, that makes sense.

Kasper Larsen: 3:13
No, it's just the younger generation. They are more around than we used to be at least I used to be uh, so, uh, yeah, that's nice to see that they get some international experience and uh, and get to see the world from a different point of view than just from being back home all the time. So true, and they have been around as well, because they've been to india. When they were sort of like last year's in the primaries, they had a trip to India there to see what the world looks like. Other places we were in Australia back in.

Kasper Larsen: 3:49
That was some well a lot of years ago where we took a trip from Sydney to Brisbane, nice, and then Arby, yeah, yeah, that was really nice. We were actually looking into if we should sort of immigrate at that time, because I preferred that my kids grew up speaking English, because that would be a major boom for them later on. But then we decided that, well, it was a bit too far for the grandparents to visit us in Australia, so that was. I didn't get anything out of that. So, yeah, what do you do for fun? I used to dive scuba diving yeah, that was really my thing. I've been diving in the Red Sea sometimes, and also with my kids both of them are also certified divers, so they really like that as well and I've been to thailand and the philippines as well, but there haven't been any trips lately. The last two years I haven't gone at all. So that that's. That's something I have to to correct.

Kasper Larsen: 4:49
Uh, in the next couple of years, I guess you need to come to, to where I live yeah right, I also take long hikes with my dog like uh, nice, 20, 25 miles in a row. So yeah, it's just wow. It's really good for my head because if I'm getting sort of like stressed or I'm thinking too much about what's going on both my professional life and also pMP stuff and stuff If I go on a hike, that will sort of like clear my mind and I'll be completely stress-free when I get home. So, that's a nice thing.

Mark Smith: 5:24
And then sometimes I do a bit of carpentry as well.

Kasper Larsen: 5:28
I've got a cottage by the sea and it's all made of wood so it has to be updated and replaced and painted and so forth every time. So, yeah, I really like working with my hands from time to time. If it's something that I can do because I like to, not because I have to, so yeah, that's nice to do that and I still have my 10 fingers.

Mark Smith: 5:52
So so far it's going fine, hi, you ever put one through a bandsaw or anything like that oh, it's been closed a couple of times, but let's not talk about that yeah, I saw that growing up a friends, a family, with a bandsaw. It can be so quick. And, um, tell me the best dive site you've been to ever, the, the most memorable.

Kasper Larsen: 6:13
That was a place just north of like, in the middle of the Philippines actually it's called Tupetara, and it was a reef, a coral reef, and there was almost nobody there, because it was like we had to sail for about 24 hours from our destination. And it was also in the area where there had been some uh issues, uh sort of like. Uh, there have been some pirate attacks and stuff like that the previous year, so, uh, it was a it's not. It's not such a convenient place to get to, but it was the most wonderful place to die, absolutely. There was a lot of a lot of beautiful corals. There was no bleaching as well. The corals can bleach so they turn all white and die, especially in the Great Barrier Reef. That's a bit because of global warming, but there was nothing in the Tubatara and there was a lot of sharks Just the reef sharks, not the big oceanics. They were further out. It was the most magnificent place, that's true, but yeah, I recommend that Amazing.

Mark Smith: 7:21
I'm not sure whether this is correct, but I look out over the Pacific Ocean here in New Zealand and we have a set of islands called the Poor Night Islands and according to Jacques Costeau, it's his top five dive sites in the world and it has one of the biggest underwater sea caves. And when I say underwater, you can drive in a boat into the cave and it's like a massive amphitheater. So it's not like that. You have to dive down and then into the cave. But it's at the bottom of the Pacific Trench and so therefore, amazingly, because we've got colder water temperatures here, it has a heap of tropical fish, and it's not that the fish swam there, it's that the spawn got washed down in the tidal currents and they hatched there, and so they can't produce any new fish because it's too cold the temperature. So all this tropical fish life there has all come down by eggs hatching once they got close enough, and it's all a marine reserve and everything. So absolutely beautiful. That's where.

Mark Smith: 8:22
That's where I did my dive ticket. Okay, um, yeah, so, um, I was in in lake baikal in uh in russia, and I was tempted to that's the largest freshwater lake in the world um, and dive under ice. But my wife was like I do not trust their safety is going to be at the level that, and so you know cause it would have been higher all the equipment and everything and then basically dropped through a piece of ice and the ice was very thick, you know, on Lake Baikal and but uh, but so I kind of regret not doing that. And then the other one that I wanted to do was in Iceland. But you can dive the continental plates and you can dive and it's just crystal clear. Amazing the photos I've seen. That's another dive site I'd love to do.

Kasper Larsen: 9:08
None of them are for me, that's for sure, because I prefer hot water. I don't dive here at home at all. I only dive when I'm at a fellow's house because I really can't take that freezing sensation. It's not for me. I prefer it like 28 degrees centigrade or something like that.

Mark Smith: 9:28
That's the right temperature for me. Yeah, one other thing you mentioned there was around walking and the therapeutic nature of walking, and I've read so much around how it, you know, can create mental clarity. Being out in nature, you know, just walking, not running or anything, so not necessarily doing it even for the physical benefits, but just the ability to get mental clarity. What kind of got you on that journey of of doing these long walks?

Kasper Larsen: 10:01
actually I used to run. Uh, I have done like back in the day I did like, uh, what 50 kilometers a week or something like that, and a half marathon in the weekend or something like that, but my knees kind of given up on me so I had to change to something that was easier on my knees. So that's why I started walking. And then I got a dog, a retriever, and she doesn't mind at all going for a walk, so that was very easy to do that. And also, where we have our cabin on an island, it's just so easy to just walk along the coast and I can do that all the time because there's always something new to see. There's always either the sea has a specific color, or clouds are behaving in a specific way, or it's just that it's green. There's life all over the place. I love it.

Kasper Larsen: 10:58
Yeah, last time we were out walking we stumbled upon a seal and I thought it was just lying on the beach. I thought it was there and the dog went and had a look at it and then it just woke up, just taking a nap. Wow, well, that's just the kind of stuff that happens if you're out in the nature. You'll see funny things eventually. So, yeah, I really enjoyed that. That's good for my mental health.

Mark Smith: 11:24
Let's switch gears, let's talk about PowerShell. What is it? Why is it important? Why is it misunderstood? What's your take on it?

Kasper Larsen: 11:32
Initially it was considered a tool for administrators, because that was some what 30 years ago, now that Microsoft came up with the idea that they should have this tool that would make it easier for admins to control all of their on-premises servers and stuff, whatever they had. And it evolved from there and expanded out into all of Microsoft products. Basically, and if you have been working with Microsoft stuff for some years, you'll know that sometimes you'll see capabilities that you cannot control using any kind of GUI, because it's only controllable by PowerShell or another scripting tool. So that was the way that Microsoft promoted the tool, that it was the way to administrate all of your computers and servers and whatever. And then it moved into Microsoft 365, where it was Microsoft 365 at the day and there was a specific brand of kind of a variant of PowerShell called P&P PowerShell, specifically for repetitive tasks related to SharePoint initially, and now it's also for everything else related to Microsoft 365. So it has expanded quite a lot since Erwin van Hoenen who came up with the idea, because according to him he was lazy and I can sign on on that one as well, because I don't want to do the same thing twice if I can avoid it, so sometimes I might spend a day automating something that would have taken me an hour, but then I guess we've all been there. But nowadays it's a tool that can basically manage all of Microsoft 365.

Kasper Larsen: 13:28
And I came upon that back in oh, it's a long time ago, 10 years ago or something like that. I started using that as well because the tools that we had on-premise they were sort of like Microsoft had given up on them and they were not maintained anymore. So that was an obvious choice to go for something new. And then I figured out that there was another part of PMP that was not related to PowerShell. It was related to provisioning, the idea that you can provision a given set of objects or lists of libraries or whatever.

Kasper Larsen: 14:02
What have you using this provisioning tool? That was very handy as well to use that. And further on I came upon the tool that I'm working on a lot nowadays, which is called PMP Modern Search, because back in the day the SharePoint had their own web parts for creating custom search portals for specific purposes, and then Microsoft decided that we should modernize SharePoint and the new version that came up, sharepoint Modern, didn't have those web parts at all. So we were kind of stuck in the middle of nowhere, and then the community took up the challenge and actually created those web parts, and those are the web parts that I'm working on nowadays and trying to do my very best, supporting them and making sure that people know about them as much as possible.

Mark Smith: 14:57
So before we jump into patterns and practices, which I think is a very interesting topic in its own right, just on the PowerShell side of things back in the day many, many moons ago, when I used to work with Unix systems and Linux systems, is that command line was a very common way of interfacing. I think there was a and I'm stretching my memory here. It might have been. Vim was one of the tools I used way back then with the Bash and that type of thing, and so Microsoft famously created this whole GUI experience, which is our modern way of interfacing. But of course you can do a heck of a lot, even on Azure right with PowerShell, and I know you know from my side power platform space. There's a lot that you can do with PowerShell around managing environments and things like that, package deployments and the like.

Mark Smith: 15:51
When you're introducing PowerShell to the first time to folks, how do you kind of convince them why this is a smarter way of working, this is a more efficient, proficient? You mentioned there that you know you don't want to do things twice. If you don't need to do things twice, right. If you've got a pattern and a behavior that can be repeated because you know it's right? Um, why manually do something over and over again? And even though it's not sold as an automation tool like power automate or or anything like that, it is really you know. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it has a lot to do with automating repetitive processes with a very predictable outcome. Is that that?

Kasper Larsen: 16:35
right, that's exactly right. Yeah, exactly yeah, because the only problem is that you've been working with Microsoft for many years, and so have I, and it's sometimes hard to love Microsoft, because sometimes they do stuff where we don't really we can't follow their reason at all and in some cases we actually see cases where we cannot do it. We cannot do something programmatically using PowerShell or C Sharp or whatever. We have to use the GUI, because they came up with the feature without an API. It happens sometimes and since I became an MVP, I used to point it out to the product teams that that is not an optimal way to do it, because then we are kind of then as consultants, we're kind of stuck in the middle, because we have customers who say we can see this, this looks nice, we would like to have that automated, please, and then it's just like nope, you have to wait for them to eventually come up with the API.

Mark Smith: 17:37
If they ever do it, yeah, and then that just leaves you RPA, right.

Kasper Larsen: 17:41
Exactly.

Mark Smith: 17:41
As an alternative, but it's another whole bunch of tech you have to involve in the process.

Kasper Larsen: 17:46
Exactly so. Yeah, but in most cases when I introduce new people to PowerShell, it's an easy sell because it doesn't take very long for them If I give them a guide saying how can you create this specific outcome. There's sort of like 50 different steps they have to go through, and I usually just let them go through that twice, yeah, and in the second run there's an error. Because we are humans, we cannot do this. We cannot just follow this recipe and do it exactly at the same time, unless we have special capabilities in that regard. Some people are just like they can focus on some stuff, and I'm just not one of them. I have to put it in code in order to make it automatic, to make sure that it's the same each time, and we do that a lot. We create a lot of provisioning portals where people can create specific sites, teams, whatever, for a specific purpose, with all of the metadata and stuff like that, and in those cases you can't do that. It's just not possible.

Mark Smith: 19:45
Tell me about patterns and practices, or PMP. What is the idea behind it, how did it come about and, once again, why is it important and really should be part of the way any type of consultant or practitioner that's working with tech should be thinking about. Is it a philosophy or is it a methodology? How do you classify it?

Kasper Larsen: 20:07
It's more like community, basically, but based, of course, on the idea that why should we not share our knowledge and make sure that we stand on the shoulders of giants, rather than having to reinvent the wheel each of us again and again and again? So it was an idea that popped up a number of years ago in the SharePoint space, where people could see that there was a lot of repetitive ideas, that people, or everybody, invented their own provisioning tool, for instance.

Mark Smith: 20:39
I'm guilty of that.

Kasper Larsen: 20:40
I've done that as well. So each time we're basically wasting our efforts, because if I write one, you write one. Then I write another one because I wasn't satisfied with the first one. If we can pool our efforts, then we can come up with a solution that is way better than what we can come up with, a solution that is way better than what we can come up with as individuals. And the time was also getting right for that, because back in the day it was open source and community was not really such a popular thing.

Kasper Larsen: 21:13
There were some people at Microsoft that considered that to be sort of like cancer. But they've changed their minds a lot. Absolutely, they've come full 360 on that one, and so therefore, it became an idea that we should sort of like join forces rather than work for ourselves. And I'm guilty of that as well, because back in the day, knowledge was power and so we were just hoarding the knowledge that we could and sharing with our colleagues yeah, perhaps sharing with external people we don't even know, perhaps even in different countries. Why would we do that? That was sort of like the idea that we could co-create these tools. That would make it so much easier for us, and it also increased the quality as well, because if you have like 10 sets of eyes on the same line of code, the likelihood that it's correct is way better than it's a code that only one or two people have actually looked at.

Kasper Larsen: 22:13
So that was the basic idea, and we're not called Patterson Practices anymore. That was the name back in the day and it's stuck in. Pmp're not called Patterson Practices anymore. That was the name back in the day and it's stuck in PMP. That's Patterson Practices. That's where it came from. Nowadays we're called something more like Microsoft 365. Microsoft changed that from time to time. We are not a part of Microsoft. I'm not working for Microsoft when I'm doing PMP work. It's important to stress that, because we have had people that had the impression that we were actually paid by Microsoft and we had to live up to certain expectations related to service level agreements and so on. That's not the case.

Kasper Larsen: 22:55
We're all volunteers.

Mark Smith: 22:56
It's a community initiative, right, yeah? So I did a search and I've got two links that I'll put in the show notes. One is on PMP modern search, and then the other one is on PMP script samples. Are those both the kind of so PMP samples? Is the site? Are those the repositories that you guys are working and maintain?

Kasper Larsen: 23:18
That's actually run by a great guy called Paul Pollock and he has. That was just an idea that we all have a small set of utility scripts where we can do various stuff and like running through all of the sites on the tenant and find out where something is used or not used and how much space it takes up, and so on and so forth. So every kind of strange little utility scripts. But it's important to note that it's just samples, so it's showing the idea. It's not production grade. We don't have anything where we use sort of like the full monty, it's just the concept, so showing how the concept actually works, and then you can take it from there and implement it yourself, because we cannot actually provide production-grade code because it's just our own small samples.

Mark Smith: 24:21
So one of the little easter eggs I've come across online which I notice it's on the pmp modern search v4 site on github that's in the show notes is this little guy that looks like he's wearing a. You know is he a chipmunk or, and you know, he's got the looks like a pine. Actually it's a porcupine actually he's a porcupine.

Kasper Larsen: 24:42
Is that yours? It's Parker. No, no, no, he was there way before I actually started working on that one. What the character's called Parker? He's called Parker, parker the porcupine, oh yeah. He's our mascot in the.

Mark Smith: 24:55
PNP community. That is so cool. I love it. I love it. I love it because I see it popping up on LinkedIn and all over the place and I've wondered for a while is this somebody, or is it Okay? So, Parker the Porcupine.

Kasper Larsen: 25:06
Exactly. I don't know where he actually came from, but I think it's a wonderful idea.

Mark Smith: 25:13
It really is. That's so cool. That's so cool Now, just as we switch gears and I know we're getting close on time here but I want to talk a bit about SharePoint Premium and in the Power Platform space. For the traditional purists that were in the Power Platform pre-2016, it was called Dynamics CRM back then and when I started it was called MSCRM, which was know what our modern day dataverse is and allows us to build apps and solutions, automations, etc. All over the top of it and as a data source through the seeded license now microsoft called basic license in m365, you could build quite a few solutions and stuff and, of course, one of the purest things we would say is yeah, but SharePoint's not a relational database and therefore don't do that. It doesn't allow you, for you know role-based security, rbac, things like that, and so there's kind of a feeling that those people that came from that are haters of SharePoint.

Mark Smith: 26:16
Now here's the thing is that you know and I will speak very strongly against SharePoint used as a database as such but I think SharePoint is an amazing technology and I have just seen it. I don't know that the world necessarily knows how much investment is going into it from Microsoft around and how AI in the context of SharePoint and particularly things around document automation, which is a massive, massive, you know multi, multi, multi-million piece of you know kit that often big companies have, you know, have in them. You know, if you've got a legal process, if you've got a policy procedure, you're going to have a lot of very precise ways of doing documents. And therefore, you know I think SharePoint Premium is in my community, you know, as in you know it's had a tough rap, but really what it can do and how powerful as a tool set it is is pretty amazing. You're in SharePoint Premium all the time. What's the story that you tell people of why SharePoint Premium is such a big deal?

Kasper Larsen: 27:29
SharePoint Premium came out of the SharePoint as part of the Microsoft development department, basically, and it was sort of like an idea that we can take it further. We had all of the basic capabilities and then they came up with this.

Kasper Larsen: 27:46
It was initially called Syntex Yep that was the name of it initially and then it came up with, I think, a variety of funny ideas, some of them huge, some of them tiny, and it was sort of like it's really a mixed bag because it contains features, funny ideas, some of them huge, some of them tiny. It's really a mixed bag because it contains features, like they have included now automatic backup, which used to be something. They are really eating their partner's lunch there.

Mark Smith: 28:15
Is that super new though, that automatic backup, because I felt that the syntax and stuff some of its weakness was around not having a really good archival strategy, that type of thing you know, as in when a document's end of life, how do we move it to cold storage, things like that.

Kasper Larsen: 28:32
Oh, that's there as well, because backup is just backup, like you keep it for some time and then you can restore it if you have to, but it's just backup and also introduced the microsoft archive, which is where you can move it from hot storage to cold storage, sort of like cold storage. Normally you have to pay like 20 cent per gigabyte for your storage. If you exceeded what actually comes with the tenant that you purchased and the licenses that you have, you have to pay a certain amount and for some people that is going to get really expensive real fast because the amount of files or content basically that is dumped into SharePoint each month it's completely wild how much is dumped in there. So of course some people will run out of the stories that they have been allotted in the first place and then they have to pay additional. So for those people it really makes sense to sort of consider how can we move some of it. Some of it should be deleted, of course, both for space or consumption of SharePoint space, but also for legal reasons they should delete that. But in some cases you want to keep your content around, also for legal reasons, like you have to keep it for seven years. You do choose some bookkeeping laws and what have you, but you don't want it to be available in the hot storage because it's just too expensive and you don't really need that much. You just need to make sure that you have it if you're going to need it.

Kasper Larsen: 30:05
So that's another thing that came out. But then they also have the enhancers what I call enhancers, but basically it's sort of like all of this ai that is so hot right now. I don't really like AI and I don't really like Copilot. I like it when it becomes a product, becomes an enhancer in the product. For instance, they have something called autofill columns, which is basically a very tiny prompt that will take the document that you just uploaded. It will take the scanned document and then extract some metadata and put it into the various columns that you have on your document library. So all of the problems that we had back in the day where we had uploaded the document we had to ask people to fill out some metadata about who's the customer here when the other date that this document is due, for instance, all of that kind of stuff.

Kasper Larsen: 30:57
people hate to fill out that kind of information, but if you can get Copilot to do it for you, it's a win for everybody, because you can actually see the values. That's correct. You can also search for it. It's also available there. And another thing is it's also available for Copilot if you want to extract bulk results as well. So it's a win-win for everybody. And the only thing is that there's an additional cost.

Kasper Larsen: 31:23
It's not an additional license. It's not an E7 license, at least not yet but nowadays they're going into a different policy where we pay per view or pay as you go. So in this case, if I go through a document and I extract some metadata and put that on the item, that will cost me based on how often I do that. So in some cases you can also do document translation. That's also a part of premium nowadays. But if you dump a document, then it will also magically be translated from English to German and Spanish without anybody doing anything, except we might sometimes have people looking through the documents just to make sure that it is translated to the best of their abilities, but sometimes we might have to go through it. But that makes a lot of sense in cases where you have multi-language companies, for instance, that you can actually use both content which could be SharePoint pages, whatever but also documents that they automatically translated into the various languages that we need. So there's a lot of these small enhancers which I really, really, really like.

Mark Smith: 32:34
I think also, document classification from a security perspective is another massive win that AI brings right. I don't need to know whether I'm allowed to send this document outside my network or not. We can auto-classify now with the AI ability to understand that document. So, Purview, I just think amazing how this is going to make more robust business processes going forward.

Kasper Larsen: 32:58
And it's also excellent timing because, as a lot of people have mentioned, you cannot really use Copilot for anything if your data quality sucks. So, of course, getting cleaned up all of the stuff you already have and make sure that the new stuff that you actually add to the mix that it is correct and up to date, that makes it just so much easier for us to make sure that the model that we have or the grounding that we have is actually correct, that the basis is correct.

Mark Smith: 33:28
I like it.

Kasper Larsen: 33:28
I really like that because I've been really heavy into information architecture for the last 25 years or so and that has been an ongoing struggle to make sure that people actually understand that they have to provide that kind of information in order to use it afterwards. But they don't really care because they're just producers, they're just providing these documents, they're not going to use it afterwards. So then it can be a hassle for us to make sure that people actually do as they are expected to, because nobody really noticed anyway. So yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 34:08
Kasper, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kasper Larsen: 34:12
Any final words before I let you go. I've heard some of your ranting about the Power Platform that you're really angry that Microsoft have presented it as a maker tool, not as a pro tool, and then it is changing. But I have to agree I actually jumped on that bandwagon back in the day. I looked at the Power Platform at that time. It was a Power Automate it was called Flow at that time, but it looked like Excel and there wasn't really any LAM tooling for it as well. So I just considered something for fun, and nowadays I really follow you that they made a big problem for themselves, because nowadays it's not for fun, it's an enterprise tool, but they still have a legacy.

Kasper Larsen: 34:56
There's sort of like a smell to it that it's just for fun and for prototyping basically. But yeah, I hear that must be a tough one to deal with.

Mark Smith: 35:06
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.