Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Someone asked last week for some help with a WebDAV script that shows public folders replicas. Now this is one of the cool things you can do using PfdavAdmin which also uses WebDAV to do the same thing. So this makes it rife for scripting the thing to remember when you want to change these types of settings that pfdavadmin is modifying is that you need to use the Administrative Virtual Root . The property that holds the replica list is http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0x66980102 which when you working in WebDAV is Base64 encoded null terminated strings. So to successfully display the replicas in the list you first need to decode the base 64 and then parse out and replace the null terminators so it can be something meaning in VB. The method I’ve used is just to replace the nulls with Line Feeds this makes it firstly easy to display the value and also the Line Feeds can also act as placeholders when you need to build the new replica list to post back to the server when you wan...

Message Size limits in Exchange can be set at a number of different levels to give you the flexibility that we as IT people yearn for. This flexibility does come at a cost if you have to answer that quick question about what limits you actually have in your Exchange Org. If you want to work out what the effective message size limit was for one particular user via the GUI you would first have to check Global Setting under Message Delivery The Setting on Each Connector the mail could flow though The Setting on Each of the SMTP Virtual Servers mail could flow though The Setting on the Actual user account (This is all documented in Q322679 ) So what I’ve put together is a script that queries all these setting from active directory and outputs the results to the console. The Script logic is pretty simple if queries each of the different objects types in the configuration partition and then accesses the limit property if they have been set and display it back to console. The first query hit...

There’s been a bit of buzz lately about the uncertain future of public folders. This got me thinking about how I use public folders sometimes to achieve certain things and how I might go about replacing this. One of things I use public folders for sometimes is to act as a shared mailbox like Mark has described in http://www.msexchange.org/articles/MF021.html . This is a quick easy way to achieve a shared mailbox and works fairly well. There are a few ways you could go about replacing something like this because I have a database server and a few IIS servers already in my network with spare capacity this seemed like it could offer an alternative. So I started with a basic framework of a mailbox that would receive email for my shared mailbox’s email address this would then fire an Event sink attached to the mailbox which would then parse the message and the attachments out and store these is a database. I’ve then got an ASP.NET web application that can then read and display a list of m...