The Social Media Scripting Framework has been published now for several weeks and the feedback that I’ve been collecting so far it’s been quite positive. In fact, I’ve learned a lot from the conversations that I’ve had with some of you and I am pretty confident that we are going to see interesting evolutions on future releases thanks to your contributions. Therefore, I would like to start thanking you all for help and support.

However, it is time to start explaining some concepts more in detail and showing up more complex examples. So, let’s start with the challenge: let’s run a Social Media Campaign from PowerShell!

Defining the scope …

For the purpose of this exercise, we are going to define our “project” as a broadcasting campaign run by someone that needs to know the exact impact of the activities that have been developed:

1. under the scope of that campaign
2. in the Social Media channels — namely, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — that will participate on it.

In order to achieve it, we have to capture the metrics associated to each post that gets pushed on these channels as a result of every action of our broadcasting campaign. In other words, if there is additional activity on them we need to be able to ignore it and identify those posts that strictly belong to our campaign.

Continue reading …

It’s been a while since my last post. And there has been a reason for it, actually. I’ve been working on a new project, the Social Media Scripting Framework: a PowerShell-based environment that abstracts the complexities of modern Social Media Channels from the PowerShell command-line.

There is not question that Social Media Technologies have opened the door, not only to new ways of interaction and relationship, but also to new ways to evaluate and measure them. However, after looking at the current ecosystem of tools and solutions for a while, I’ve observed that many of them, and sometimes all of them, follow similar structural patterns. For example:

• Form factor: SaaS delivered through the web. This, actually, is a very convenient way to provide a service while hiding the complexities to the consumer. But, unfortunately, this virtue is at the same time the main drawback. More often than not, our SaaS provider only focuses on a discrete set of functionalities and forces us to look somewhere else to fill in the gaps. At the end of the day, we end up with a collection of web services that we try to “orchestrate” by means of some sort of “digital craftsmanship”.



Continue reading …

Several months ago, I happened to share a nice conversation about the potential of PowerShell as part of the IT/Enterprise Architecture. Then I discovered that the benefits of architecting IT-aware Applications are still widely unknown or misunderstood. That’s the reason I would like to share my thoughts on this subject pointing out the special role that PowerShell can play in this field.

IT-aware Services and Applications

IT-aware Services and Applications incorporate the necessary instrumentation so that IT and Operations Teams can control, monitor, diagnose and operate them using the same semantics that the business uses in addition to the classic IT constructs and abstractions.

These utilities allow IT and Operations to be aligned more efficiently with the business because the own business concepts are completely integrated with the environment and the tools that both IT and Operations use to do their work.

This Instrumentation Stack can be break down into different components or services that need to be implemented inside the applications:

1. Activity Tracking and Performance Monitoring. In the Microsoft world, this is usually implemented as Logging Facilities (Log4net, Enterprise Library Logging Application Block, etc.), Performance Counters and ETW Providers.
2. Command and Control: PowerShell in the Microsoft ecosystem.



Continue reading …