About Me

Hi, I’m Ryan Milne. I’m an IT pro living in Coventry, UK. I’ve had a knack for all things technical for as long as I can remember, but also in a ridiculously organised way. (Even my homelab is all documented in OneNote – 50MB and counting).

Right now I am particularly focused on all things Microsoft – Windows Server, AD, Group Policy, Exchange, Office 365, Hyper-V, Skype for Business, and of course Windows ME. But I am also a generalist who does not shy away from any particular technology. For one, I am the “Linux Guy” everywhere I have worked.

PowerShell is my #1 passion in IT. I love to automate manual processes, write elegant code that follows best practices, and write the documentation to go with it. Professional projects I have completed involving PowerShell include:

  • Automated the new user creation process in a small/medium accountancy firm. The result was a single New-CompanyNameUser cmdlet which automated AD User creation (including OU, groups), Exchange mailbox creation (including calendar permissions), home / profile folder creation (with the correct NTFS permissions), and Outlook HTML email signature generation.
  • Wrote a GUI-based PowerShell program for the accountancy firm’s Payroll department to use, which would import payroll from a CSV received from the customer, and output it in the specific format that Sage 50 Payroll requires.
  • Wrote a PowerShell module that automated the creation of 20-40 Microsoft Word templates from 2-4 master templates for a billing system, using the Word Component Object Model. Whenever the accountancy firm’s marketing needs changed, only 2-4 templates needed to be modified and then the rest procedurally generated from them.
  • Simplified the process of connecting to Office 365 & Exchange Online PowerShell for an MSP. The PowerShell module I created for this is now in regular use for day-to-day support; allowing the technicians to connect to the appropriate 365 Tenant using a simple GUI. They do not have to use or even understand the -TenantId parameter for Msol cmdlets, nor do they need to take the time to craft the correct New-PSSession command to connect to Exchange Online as delegated admin.
  • Automated mailbox migrations for one of the MSP’s larger customers’ staged migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange online, which saved a significant time over the previous manual process.
  • Migrated a secondary school from their old PBX system to Skype for Business Server. This included writing several PowerShell scripts for day-to-day use, including a script that automated dial plan creation, and a script that created complex auto-attendants not possible to create in the web front-end.

Contact me on LinkedIn.