PowerShell one-liner: Start a service on a remote server

A while back I wrote an article on how to start a service on a remote computer. Because Start-Service does not have a -ComputerName parameter I suggested this alternative approach:

(Get-WmiObject -Computer server1 Win32_Service -Filter "Name='msExchangePOP3'").InvokeMethod("StartService",$null)

While this works perfectly, the syntax is a bit hard to remember. Gladly I became aware of a much simpler way to do this. While we can't use Start-Service, we can use Set-Service to set the service to the Running status.

Set-Service msExchangePOP3 -Status running –ComputerName server1

That's cool, isn't it? So for instance when you're in the process of enabling IMAP on an Exchange 2013 server, your script could be something like this:

Set-Service msExchangeIMAP4 -StartupType Automatic –ComputerName server1
Set-Service msExchangeIMAP4 -Status Running –ComputerName server1
Set-Service msExchangeIMAP4BE -StartupType Automatic  –ComputerName server1
Set-Service msExchangeIMAP4BE -Status Running –ComputerName server1