Last week I was sent an email with an Excel spreadsheet containing a bunch of Microsoft TechNet KB articles that were being considered in the context of being applied to a Windows Server farm.
I had no idea what all of these KB articles were (who does after all?) so wanted to take a peek over them to get the lowdown on what was being proposed.
Given that there were 21 KB articles referenced in the spreadsheet, I really did not want to manually open each one.
Guess what? PowerShell to the rescue.
Knowing that I could parse my way over a CSV file (easily created from Excel), manipulate Internet Explorer as a COM object and that all KB articles are stubbed by the same URL (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/”, all I had to do was loop over the CSV and spawn a stack of IE tabs which I could then review at my leisure.
$content = Import-Csv .\kb.csv $iexplore = New-Object -ComObject internetexplorer.application foreach ($kb in $content) { $url = "http://support.microsoft.com/kb/"+$kb.KB $iexplore.Navigate($url,65536) } $iexplore.Visible = $true Simples!
more to follow…