Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Outlook direct booking is one of the many ways in which you can handle resource mailboxes in Exchange for a full list of other methods have a look at slipstick . Knowing which mailboxes have been enabled in your Exchange Organization could be a little tricky to keep a track of if you have a large number of mailboxes. One method of finding what mailboxes are using Direct booking is by using the freebusy data on a server. How Free-Busy data works and is stored is documented on Technet and this post on the Exchange Team Blog . The Free Busy data also comes into to play with Outlook Direct booking. When a user configures direct booking via the 3 check boxes under resource scheduling in Outlook – Calendar options there are 3 Mapi properties that get set on the local freebusy object in a mailbox. (Note this is not the only thing that happens you do enable direct booking permissions are also modified on the calendar and freebusy object in the resource mailbox) Automatically accept meeting a...

Somebody asked last week about creating a personalized auto response message based on the sender domain. While this would be pretty easy to do with a normal store based event sink another option you can use is to create a server side rule using the rule.dll. The script to do this is pretty basic there are numerous samples that show how to create a rule that will process mail based on a string in the subject field. Well all you really need to do is take that same logic and apply it to the sender address instead. So you basically end up with a rule that does a substring on the sender address looking for in this case a particular email domain and then use the Reply action which creates a normal automatic reply email using the text you configure. To use the script just configure the following line with the domain you want to use importPropVal.Value = "@domain.com” And this line with the text to respond with objReplyMsg.Text = "Im Sorry this Mailbox isn't currently maned fo...

A couple of months back I posted this script that would detect any empty distribution groups and give you the chance to delete them. Another useful thing to do now and again when your examining distribution lists in your Exchange organization is to look at how many members each group has and also what type of objects are members of certain lists. In Exchange apart from just user mailboxes you may have contacts (both internal and external), nested groups, Query based distribution lists or even public folders that are members of a distribution list. So its possible that some lists may have collected unwanted baggage in the normal course of events. So what I’ve done is come up with 3 different scripts for counting members based on the type of member of each distribution list and then generating a little html report to show the number of each type of object within each distribution list. The first script just does a basic count of the members of each list the second expands any nested gro...

One of the things I blog and create a lot of scripts for is message tracking there is so much good information stored in the Message Tracking Logs once you can pull it out and start doing things beyond what the Message Tracking Center can do in ESM. With the ability to access and manipulate WinForms like proper .net applications and also access WMI information you can with a little effort build your own replacement to the normal Message Tracking Center in ESM with a powershell script that will give you a pretty GUI based front-end that even your average Admin should be able to get their head around. And the really cool thing is you can start doing a lot more with the data that you’re mining such as aggregation. By this I mean grouping the number of emails by size and number to alllow you to see trends such as who is sending the most email, who's recieving the most email, how much data is being send and recieved from each email domain and also how much email was sent on a particula...