PowerWF Studio

Overview
Benefits
Features

PowerWF Studio™ unleashes the potential of Microsoft PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation by providing a visual integrated development environment (IDE) that virtually eliminates the need to write scripts. PowerWF's IDE provides a central environment for building, debugging, and deploying your scripts and workflows. It includes a wide array of pre-packaged activities that support these standard industry platforms. Using the PowerWF™ environment, administrators can quickly and easily automate their daily repetitive tasks.

More than the sum of its parts ...

Organizations are increasingly looking to automate administrators' daily lives. Microsoft responded with two key technologies: Windows PowerShell, which has become the preferred scripting language for Windows administrators, and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a rich visual environment for modeling and defining business rules.

Yet both of these technologies have limitations. PowerShell scripts become increasingly difficult to read and maintain over time. Windows Workflow offers a completely visual style of programming that makes it easy to develop and maintain programs, but lacks PowerShell's rich feature-set and support.

PowerWF combines both technologies into a single easy-to-use product that replaces legacy batch files, scripts and custom application development, enabling you to completely automate your IT Processes without writing a single line of code. Greater automation reduces latency in service delivery and the risk of human error - the primary cause of downtime. It also cuts your costs for maintaining existing systems, leaving more resources for new IT initiatives.

Eliminate Code

PowerWF™ enables you to build automated solutions using a simple drag-and-drop graphical user interface. No coding is required to quickly create powerful workflows that automate your daily tasks. This reduces costs and hassles associated with developing and maintaining code, scripts, and batch files.

Reduce Errors

Eighty percent of downtime is the result of human error. Automated management processes developed using PowerWF reduce latency in service delivery and the risk of human errors.

Increase Visibility

While traditional scripting tools require complicated programming logic and vendor APIs, PowerWF's visual "flow chart" paradigm hides these complexities, allowing you to concentrate on your business processes and collaborate more effectively with stakeholders. It also reduces errors and speeds the process of developing workflows.

Improve Productivity

Unlike traditional scripting tools, PowerWF gives you a uniform methodology for developing your business processes and a similar look-and-feel for all workflows. This consistent programming model improves productivity and decreases maintenance costs.

Decrease Maintenance Costs

Because workflows are represented visually to the developer as flow-charts and are coupled with built-in annotation, your scripts are essentially self-documented, making them easy to understand. This helps you reduce the 80% of your IT budget you spend maintaining existing systems, making resources available for new IT initiatives.

Protect your Investment

Whether you need to bring a Legacy application into Workflow and Powershell or export a Workflow or Powershell solution to a Legacy environment, PowerWF™ provides the capabilities you need to get the job done.

PowerWF protects your investment by supporting a myrid of methods to use your workflows. Whether you're a looking to use workflow within an existing .NET application or shell scripts, or looking forward to integration with PowerShell. PowerWF is there to support you.

PowerWF Studio's powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) gives you a central place to build, debug, and deploy your scripts and workflows. Because it uses a Microsoft user interface, it is also easy to use. Capabilities include:

Annotation

Increase the readability of your workflows by placing comments within the workflow.

Breakpoints

Quickly and easily create breakpoints within the workflow to ease the burden of debugging.

Contextual Help

Click on an activity within the toolbox or the design canvas to quickly see detailed help that describes functions and parameters.

Docking Windows

Sophisticated WYSIWYG Visual Studio.NET™ style docking panes allow PowerWF developers to easily create tear-off tabs and auto-hide windows to create a more manageable application workspace. Docking panes allow you to choose from predefined themes such as Visio and Visual Studio .NET.

Enable/Disable

This simplifies and speeds workflow development by allowing you to test one part of your workflow before moving on to the next. Simply select a block of code, right click, and choose Enable /Disable and the code will either enable or disable the selected activities.

Office 2007 Style Ribbon Bar

The Office 2007 Style Ribbon Bar enhances navigation capabilities by grouping menu and toolbar commands into logical blocks arranged in a tabular format.

Parameterization

Transform a workflow into a generalized business process that is not tied to any one entity or resource by changing constant parameters into variables. You can also add parameters that include help text. Parameters are accessible through command-line parameters, input variables, or PowerShell™ arguments.

Plug-In Manager

PowerWF Studio plug-in manager allows users to easily download new activity packs from Devfarm's website as they become available.

Tracking Points

Similar to watch variables, Tracking Points allow you to "look inside" workflows and see the property's run-time states. Using Tracking Points, you can specify conditions or an activity state that must be met and then collect information about them. This eliminates the need to reproduce errors in order to troubleshoot problems within a workflow.

Robust Scheduling

The powerful PowerWF scheduling engine enables easy job automation, whether you need to execute your workflow once a month, every Friday night, or every 5 minutes.

Window Themes

PowerWF supports application-skinning visual styles that allow users to customize the appearance and behavior of the PowerWF environment. Several predefined Visual Styles are provided, including Office 2007, Windows XP Royale Blue, and Windows XP Luna style, or you can download visual styles from websites such as devaiantART (http://www.deviantart.com/).

PowerWF protects your existing investments by giving you myriad ways to use your workflows, including within shell scripts, an existing .NET application, or integrated with PowerShell. Features include:

Agent

Used in conjunction with PowerWF's scheduling engine, PowerWF™ Agent allows you to schedule recurring tasks to run in the background via a Windows® Service.

.NET Assembly

Build .NET assemblies (*.dll) for use within .NET applications. Developers can quickly and easily develop workflows that harness the richness of the PowerWF workflow engine and activity libraries without coding. PowerWF encapulates the complexity of the workflow engine with parameters within a simple function call.

Console Application

PowerWF enables you to build command-line console executables complete with command-line arguments, enabling the integration of workflows into existing shell scripts.

Windows Application

Use PowerWF to build a Windows application, in which the parameters are presented to the user within a simple Windows control.

PowerShell cmdlet

Build a PowerShell cmdlet in minutes. PowerWF gives you the unique ability to take an existing workflow and make it accessible from PowerShell via a cmdlet. This allows developers to extend the reach of PowerShell to platforms that do not natively include a PowerShell API. The PowerShell cmdlet fully supports parameter passing and help text.

PowerShell Snap-In

Combine multiple-workflows into a single PowerShell "snap-in" for complete PowerShell compliance. Each workflow represents a PowerShell command and fully supports parameter passing and help text.

Visual Studio

To further customize your workflow, you can export it as a Visual Studio 2008 project, which gives a C# developer complete control of the workflow environment.

Web Service

PowerWF allows you to publish your workflow as a Web service. You can thus make your workflows available to any client capable of invoking a Web service.

The VIX activity pack furnishes building blocks that allow you to quickly develop complex workflows that automate virtual machine operations, as well as the guests within virtual machines. PowerWF supports all the functions available within VMware's VIX API with none of complexities. The product covers VMware Server 1.0, VMware Server 2.0 or earlier, Workstation 6.5 or earlier, and ESX/ESXi 3.5 U3. Available activities include:

Guest

Automate more than 20 different activities that involve operations on the Guest OS within a virtual machine. Activities include copying files between Host and Guest, file system manipulation (create, delete, rename existence), execution of programs or shell scripts, and screen capture

Host

Connect/Disconnect to the host system

Power

Power On, Power OFF, Pause, Reset, and Suspend operations

Properties

Read/Write variables, includes virtual machine configuration, environment variables in the guest, and VMware "Guest Variables".

Shared Folders

Add, Delete, Enable, and get properties of shared folders in a VM

Snapshots

Create, Remove, and revert virtual machines states as a snapshot

Tools

Install or wait for tools to be started in the guest operating system

Clone, Delete, or Open VMware virtual machines.

More than 150 activities "in the box" to get you started managing your OS and filesystems, monitoring and pushing data on the network, scraping output from both local and remote shell commands, visualizing data in several easy to read from dialogs, data manipulation activities to lubricate data flow, and more.

File System Activities

PowerWF File System Activity Pack includes 20 activities that allow you to control the Windows file system. All of the following activities run locally or remotely:

Directories

Get, create, delete, and check existence.

Files

Get, create, delete, and check existence.

Encryption

Decrypt/Encrypt files using the Windows encryption APIs

File System Monitoring

Monitor the file system directory for changes so you can act on them immediately

Network Activity Library

PowerWF's Network Activity Pack includes over 15 useful activities that make it quick and easy to populate network tools. These include:

FTP

Retrieve (get) and write (put) files and directories

HTTP

Get and post operations

Ping

Gather network statistics by pinging

RSS

Get and post information via an RSS Feed

SCP

Get and Put files using the security copy protocol

SFTP

Get and Put files using secure ftp

SMTP

Send email using Standard Mail Transfer Protocol

Network Statistics

Gather low-level TCP/UDB protocol statistics

Shell Commands

The PowerWF Shell Activity Pack allows you to use remote processes to obtain unstructured data from any scripting language and turn it into structured data that can be used in a workflow, improving the flexibility and extensibility of your workflows. Activities include:

Console Execute

Execute an external process.

SSH Execute

Execute a command on a remote Unix/Linux box using SSH.

WSH Execute

Allows automation of Windows Scripts using the Windows Script Host.

PowerShell Execute

Execute a PowerShell command.

Visualization

PowerWF Visualization Activity Pack 20 activities to help display metrics help display data/messaging.

Console Output

Write text to the console.

Credentials

Prompt for credentials.

Data Grids

Displays any type of enumerable data in a familiar datagrid interface.

MessageBox

Displays a message box with user-defined content and title.

Property Grid

Displays any type of enumerable data in a Property Grid dialog.

Toaster

Display a pop-up 'toaster' desktop alert window, similar to those seen in popular instant message and mail clients.

Windows Management

PowerWF's Windows Management Activity Pack includes over 35 useful activityes that provide quick and easy management your Windows environment. All the activities are capable of running locally or remotely.

EventLog

Control every aspect of the Windows Eventlog: Backup, Clear, Get, and Write eventlog entries.

Network Shares

Activities to control Network Shares: Create, Delete, and retrieve Windows shared resources.

OS Environment

Retrieve various properties of the Windows environment. including: Page Files, Drives, Installed Software, Schedule Tasks, and more.

Performance Monitor

A performance monitor query window allows for quick gather of metrics stored within Perfmon for integration within a workflow. In addition, support is provided to quickly and easily publishing of metric to the Performance Monitor.

Process

Gather running information for all running processes. Plus, the ability to kill a run-away process.

Registry

Write & Read values from the Windows Registry.

System Services

Control Windows Services:, Disable, Start, Stop, Pause, and Removing.

User Accounts

Gather information on users, groups, and system accounts and their privileges.

WMI Query Builder

The WMI query window allows you to quickly build, test, and integrate WQL statements and WMI class properties into your workflow.

PowerWF comes with awarding winning tools, developed by VMWare expert Robert Petruska, that provide easy-to-use GUI front ends for the command-line tools available for VMware Workstation. These tools make PowerWF a one-stop shop for VMware Workstation tools. They include:

VMware DiskMount GUI

A Windows GUI front-end for VMware's drive mount that allows you to mount an unused virtual disk as a separate drive or partition without having to connect to the virtual disk from within a virtual machine. This allows you to maintain the file system easily while using fewer CPU cycles and less memory.

VMware DiskManager GUI

A Windows GUI front-end for VMware's Disk Virtual Manager, which is a utility in VMware Server, that allows you to create, manage, and modify virtual disk files from the command line or within scripts. Key features include the ability to enlarge the capacity of a virtual disk rather than have to add another virtual disk or transfer data to a larger virtual disk.

Virtual DiskFactory

A Windows GUI front-end for VMware's command-line disk manager, with many advanced functions.

VMX Builder

VMX Builder is an application for creating vmx (VMware virtual machine configuration) and vmdk (VMware virtual hard disk) files. This free tool allows you to create virtual machines that can be run by VMware Player without having to purchase the VMware Workstation product.

Time Machine

PowerWF™ Agent, coupled with the PowerWF scheduling engine, allows you to schedule recurring tasks to run in the background via a Windows® Service. Functionality includes:

Monitoring

PowerWF allows you to monitor your running workflows to gain visibility into the operations of your agents, including executions, errors, and results.

Scheduling

PowerWF's powerful built-in scheduling allows you to easily automate jobs, whether you need to execute your workflow once a month, every Friday night or every 5 minutes.

WMI Instrumented

The agent publishes all the available metrics from the running workflow via Windows Management Interface (WMI) to support external application monitors, such as Microsoft's System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).