Most of my automation work at Abbey Carpet started the same way: someone was doing the same careful, manual job on a schedule, and the job was a better fit for a script than for a person.
IIS server migrations
I wrote PowerShell automation to support moving sites during IIS server migrations. On a network of more than 600 sites, anything done by hand per site is slow and easy to get slightly wrong, and slightly wrong on a production web server means a site that does not load.
A recurring 28,000-file dataset
A coworker regularly had to work through a dataset of more than 28,000 files and images. I automated the analysis in PowerShell. It saves them more than two weeks of work a year.
Finding unused Sitecore assets
The same approach turned up more than 10,000 media assets in Sitecore that nothing was using anymore. Identifying them made it possible to clear them out and reduce the size of the database.
A weekly legacy system update
A legacy system needed a manual update every week. I automated it in Python, which saves more than 30 minutes every week.
Results
- 2+ weeks a year returned to a coworker
- 10,000+ unused assets identified in Sitecore, reducing database size
- 30+ minutes a week saved on the legacy system update
Together these are part of what I mean when I say I’ve automated processes that saved weeks of work per year.