PowerShell has support for many different Import- and Export Methods, and also different scripts extend possible formats further.

But there is one format that is capable to export/import PowerShell objects and keep as much as possible from the object values: CLIXML

When you export objects using Export-CLIXML, PowerShell gets all values from the object (keeping the data types), and also recursivly values from properties that are objects themself (configurable depth, default 2).

The resulting XML files are plaintext, so they can easily be zipped, mailed, etc. between systems.

Import-CLIXML transforms the CLIXML data again into an object, and the object properties can be used mostly the same way as the original object properties.

This could be used to manually fetch values from one server and work with these values on another system (admin-Workstation, another Server, …). This is especially useful for documentation purposes, if there are multiple dependencies and scripts needed to process the values, and we can not use PowerShell remoting and do not want to deploy the complete scripts on the source server.