When writing PowerShell scripts for use in our Active Directory environment, I noticed that I use the same variables and information in every script. That’s all fine, but when something changes I had to update each and every script seperately. And you always forget to update 1 or 2 scripts which is annoying.
At one of my previous employers, they developed something they refered to as a provisioning script. This script not only contained these variables and information, but also a lot of commonly used functions. Among others, this script contained functions to create new user accounts and service accounts. Other scripts, outside of the provisioning script, could then ‘import’ the provisioning script using a technique called dot sourcing and be able to use the variables declared in the provisioning script as well as the functions from the provisioning script.
So when information changes, I only have to update 1 location.