Introduction

In this series, we will look at PnP PowerShell discover what it is and how it can be used to manage your Microsoft 365 tenants. In this post focus on what PnP PowerShell is, how to install at and run some simple cmdlets.

What is PnP PowerShell?

Microsoft describes PnP PowerShell as ‘a cross-platform PowerShell Module providing over 500 cmdlets that work with Microsoft 365 environments.’

These cmdlets focus primarily on:

• SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Planner
• Power Automate.
  

How to install PnP PowerShell

Before you can install the PnP PowerShell module, you’ll need to have already installed the SharePoint Online Management Shell, from the PowerShell Gallery.

You can see if you already have the SharePoint Online Management Shell installed, by open running PowerShell as an administrator.

1. From the start menu, search for PowerShell and ‘Run ISE as Administrator’

• In the window that opens, paste the below and hit the green play button

Get-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell -ListAvailable | Select Name,Version

• To then install the latest version, paste the below line and hit the green play button

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

• In the pop-up window that appears, select ‘Yes to All’ and wait for the installation to finish. If you already have the latest version, a message will tell you so.

Now that PnP has successfully been installed, you can start to remotely administer our tenant.

How to connect to your tenant with PnP PowerShell

It only takes one cmdlet to connect to your tenant with PnP PowerShell.

1. In the PowerShell window paste the below, replacing the bold caps with your tenant domain and your 365 username and hit the green play button:

Connect-SPOService -Url https://YOURTENANT-admin.sharepoint.com -Credential LOGIN@DOMAIN.com

• Enter your password in the pop-up window that appears.

If you tenant use multi factor authentication, you can use the below cmdlet and enter your credentials in the pop-up window that appears.

 Connect-SPOService -Url https://YOURTENANT-admin.sharepoint.com

And that’s it. You’ve now installed PnP PowerShell and connected to you Microsoft 365 tenant. In the next post, we’ll look at executing some of the most common cmdlets for SharePoint Online.

It is quite easy and quick to set up PnP PowerShell on a local system and start using it. Considering that PnP PowerShell has been gaining a lot of momentum among Devs and Admins, thought it would be good to have a post for everyone’s reference.

So why PnP PowerShell? Because it is the recommended and most updated PowerShell module for IT Pros to work on SharePoint Online, SharePoint On-premises and Office 365 Groups. It allows us to remotely mantain the SharePoint and Office 365 tenancy as we will see below.

Installation:

First, we have to make sure that we have the latest and greatest version of PowerShell (at least >= v4.0) on the system. We can simply check it using the following command $PSVersionTable.PSVersion which will give the output below.

If your version isn’t sufficient, then go to this link to upgrade – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40855. Since there are OS requirements accompanied with PowerShell, please make sure to check the System Requirements in order to make sure the OS matches the specs.

Also, I would recommend installing SharePoint Online Management Shell because there are various Tenant commands that you may not find in PnP PowerShell. The link can be found here – https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=35588. Again, make sure to check the System Requirements in order to make sure the OS matches the specs.

After you have the proper PowerShell version, run the following commands to install the PnP PowerShell module depending on if you’re using the Online or On-Premise version.  You only need to install the version(s) you need to interact with (no need to install on premise versions if you’re only working online).

SharePoint Version	Command to install
SharePoint Online	Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline
SharePoint 2016	Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShell2016
SharePoint 2013	Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShell2013

It will take few mins to run and complete the above commands, then it will ready for use.

Get Started guide:

To start using PnP PowerShell, first we will have to understand how does PnP PowerShell works.

PnP PowerShell works in the context of the current Connection the site it is connected to. Assuming it is connected to a Site Collection, all commands refer by default to that Site Collection. This is different from SPO commands which require you to have Tenant Admin rights. A benefit of the PnP approach is that you can have separate Admin personnel to manage separate site collections or sites if needed.

Overview of Basic SharePoint Operations with PnP PowerShell

1. Connect to PnP Online

Connect-PnPOnline -Url <sitecollectionUrl>

In case, you are not given a prompt for entering your credentials, then create a credential object and pass it to the Connect command.

$user = "<test user>"
$secpasswd = ConvertTo-SecureString "<password>" -AsPlainText -Force
$mycreds = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential ($siteOwner, $secpasswd)
Connect-SPOnline -url $siteAdminURL -Credentials $mycreds

2. Get the web object using Get-PnPSite and then get the subsites in it

## For Site Collection
$web = Get-PnPSite  

## For Sub web
$web = Get-PnPWeb -Identity "<Subsiteurl part only>"

3. In order to work on lists or objects of the site, use the “Includes” parameter to request them or else they will not be intialized.

$web = Get-PnPSite -Includes RootWeb.Lists

After you get the list object you can traverse it as needed using the object.

4. To work on list items, you must request the list items and same goes for updating the items.

$listItem = Get-PnPListItem -List "Site Assets"

Set-PnPListItem -List "Site Assets" -Identity 2 -Values @{"<column>" = "<value"}

So as we saw above, we could use PnP PowerShell to maintain the SharePoint assets remotely.