Scheduling tasks for SharePoint Online

Question

As we are venturing into the Office 365/SharePoint Online world, there will be the need to run some routine maintenance scripts on schedule. For example, adding a service account as an administrator to OneDrive for Business sites. I have the script to do it, have tested it, it works without issue.

The part I'm stuck on is how to set this up as a scheduled task since it requires connecting to our -my site collection to do it's work. How do people handle the username/password storage in this scenario?

Would this be better to be done as a console application so the username and password is stored and hidden in the compiled executable versus using PowerShell?

Answer 1

You can certainly encrypt / decrypt a string with powershell. So, you could have one utility script that's run just to get the password and save it as an encrypted string in a file. When the main script runs, it would read that file and decrypt the string. Instructions for this are here:

http://www.adminarsenal.com/admin-arsenal-blog/secure-password-with-powershell-encrypting-credentials-part-1/

And, don't rely on passwords being compiled in the executable! Anyone with Visual Studio who has had 5 minutes of training on how to use the ILDASM.exe tool can read any plain text in the executable, including passwords.

Answer 2

We've decided to use CSOM console applications for these tasks so passwords aren't exposed in plain text scripts.