Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

One of the new WMI classes that comes with Exchange 2003 is the Exchange_PublicFolder Class. This is actually pretty useful when it comes to managing public folders via Code. For instance being able to propagate the folder settings to all of child subjfolers http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/e2k3/e2k3/_wmiref_me_exchange_publicfolderpropagatesettings.asp . The other cool thing with this particular class is that a lot of the WMI properties are Read-Write. This means you can actually change setting and manipulate different aspect of public folders which you would usually need to use CDOEXM for. One of these is being able to mail-enable/disable a public folder. An example of mail-enabling a public folder via WMI would look like this. First you need to query the instances of public folders to find the folder you want to modify. I’ve used the Path property to search for the folder which is the normal path to the public folder but without the root suffix so if ...

When using the IMF to do spam filtering you do get the occasional user where the SCL store threshold is set a little too high. Eg if you have the store threshold set to 6 and one user is getting a lot of SPAM that is getting a SCL of 5 having a one-off type trick to push these emails into the junk email folder can come in handy. One way to do this is using the old Rule.dll COM component to create a server side rule in the inbox. Rule.dll has been around since Exchange 5.5 and because its mapi based it still works as it did back Exchange 5.5. There’s a great reference page with a lot samples on MSDN here Some fast hard facts about using the rule.dll, Rules created using the rule.dll can’t be seen, deleted or modified using Outlook. And you still need to watch out for the 32 KB rules limit on a folder. There is a copy of the rule.dll included in one of the samples on CDOlive http://www.cdolive.net/download/ruleasp.zip or there should be a copy in the Platform SDK. So to create a Rule ba...

One of the new features (among others) in Exchange 2003 OWA is the ability for the user to now search their own contacts folder when using the address book find in OWA 2003. One other location that can be used to store contacts especially if you want to share contacts among users is in a contacts folder in a public folder tree. So I was asked to look at making this available to search in OWA like the contacts folders. This brings up the first question of how can I customize OWA I went digging though some old whitepapers and found this one about customizing OWA 2000 which is mostly still relevant to Exchange 2003. The low down from this whitepaper is the core HTML used to render OWA is stored in the wmtemplates.dll file which means that you can’t really mess with it. There are some other warnings in this whitepaper about any changes made to the .js, htc or xml files used by OWA are unsupported. But further on they give you an example of modifying one of the script files used by OWA to...