I've been racking my brains behind the reasoning of the Management Shell interface. Why spend 25 years developing a wonderful GUI interface, then all of a sudden revert to a command line prompt? There seems to be a mentality that because its a command line, it must be more powerful. This is of course absolute tosh. It does give 3rd parties the ability to write their own GUI interface I guess, but I've never been very keen on using these. All it does mean is that we have a lot of complex syntaxes to learn, and that if something urgent needs doing, it'll probably be a while before the correct line can be typed out. Absolute crud. Which is a shame as I really like most of Ex2007

I am not defending the EMS by any means, as I am pretty much in agreement with you. The GUI has to be there for most administrators. However, I have warmed up to the EMS and have found some very useful things I can do with it. I figure if *I* can learn the shell, most anyone else can. Hopefully, in SP1 most of the GUI will be restored and the typical admin won't have to worry about the shell at all. However, you will find, if you play with it, that there is very cool things you can do.

Thanks for the reply Jim and really glad to hear SP1 will restore some common sense. I'm sure if I had enough time (and inclination) to spend investigating the shell I'd find some wonderful stuff, but sadly not an option for me