It’s that time of year when everything and everyone seems to be operating at 150%. Unlike most years, it’s not even Christmas itself which has kept me preoccupied, with that in some ways being a bit of an afterthought to a number of other things going on in my life right now. The first and largest change is no doubt my change of job.

It’s been a while since our trip to Europe, so I thought it best to finish off the series. Our final two destinations after Belgium was France to see Versailles and Paris and then finally Amsterdam.

I’ve been required to oversee a bulk update of a few thousand users into a manually managed portal group for which the FIM Portal is authoritative. Anyone who has had to add more than a few users knows this can be a cumbersome process by hand via the UI. To save time from doing this manually through the Portal interface I’ve thrown together a PowerShell script that will read a CSV file of users and operations (add or remove) and process those requests against a group.

Following the week in Scotland our next destination was Ghent where we were due to spend a week celebrating the wedding of Duncan and Sarah. The week turned out to be rather relaxing and an appropriate follow up to Scotland before heading to the hustle and bustle that was Paris.

The second leg of our overseas trip was a visit to Scotland for just over a week. As mentioned previously in my post on Rome, Scotland ultimately proved to be our favourite destination. Our time there consisted of two parts. The first half we spent travelling north by car from Edinburgh, past Inverness to the town of Dingwall before returning back to Edinburgh after a stop at the Loch Ness. The second half of our stay in Scotland was half a week in Edinburgh itself. It was the time in the Highlands that we particularly enjoyed.