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Quick Create Mailbox Powershell Form for Exchange 2007

A lot of times when your evaluating or testing code you may want to create some temporary mailboxes very quickly to test this or that. In Exchange 2007 the Exchange Command Shell’s new-mailbox commandlet gives a quick way of doing this. But because of the complexities of actually creating a mailbox eg knowing the Conical name of the OU and the name of the database you want to put it into etc actually typing all these values isn’t a fast or easy task. If your scripting this its not such a big deal because when your creating the script you can just cut and paste the values into your script and then you can run the thing a number of times and not have to worry about it. The Exchange Management Console provides wizards to create a mailbox but like all wizards they are designed to be easy to use not fast. So what I decided to do was see if I could put together a small 1 page form that you could run from the Exchange Command shell that would allow me to quickly put in the information that I wanted and then call the New-Mailbox commandlet to create the account.

Using the example from get-help new-mailbox as a template I created a form and populated it with textboxes to allow input of

UserPrincipalName,Alias,FirstName,LastName,DisplayName

To remove the requirement of knowing the canonical name of the OU and exact servername and database name I used Comboboxes for these values and then wired these to some other code and cmdlets to fill the values in the drop downs.

For the OU Name box an ADSI query of all the OU’s in the domain is used to populate the OU Name dropdown . For the Servername box the get-mailboxserver cmdlet is used to populate the list of mailbox servers. The servername combobox has one wired event so when a servername is select the get-mailboxdatabase cmdlet is run to then populate the Mailstore combobox for the selected severname. If the servername is change the Mailstore dropdown values should also change (to be honest I didn’t test this because I don’t have more the one server)

The password box is just a textbox as well with the UseSystemPasswordChar property set true to provide the normal password masking.

The rest of the codes is relatively simple I used some hashtables to mask some of the values to make them more practical to use in a Winform such as trimming the domain from the conical name. But the rest of the code just builds the form and then builds the new-mailbox command. The result of the command is written back to the commandline so any error messages will be displayed there.

The script only runs in the Exchange Command Shell because it’s using the Exchange cmdlets to do the work. I’ve put a down-loadable copy of the code here the code itself looks like.

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing")
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.windows.forms")

Function createmailbox{
$psSecurePasswordString = new-object System.Security.SecureString
foreach($char in $pwPassWordTextBox.Text.ToCharArray())
{
$psSecurePasswordString.AppendChar($char)
}
$result = New-mailbox -UserPrincipalName $unUserNameTextBox.text -alias $emAliasTextBox.text -database $MBhash1[$msMailStoreDrop.SelectedItem.ToString()] `
-Name $dsDisplayNameTextBox.text -OrganizationalUnit $OUhash1[$ouOuNameDrop.SelectedItem.ToString()] -password $psSecurePasswordString `
-FirstName $unFirstNameTextBox.text -LastName $lnLastNameTextBox.text -DisplayName $dsDisplayNameTextBox.text
$msgbox = new-object -comobject wscript.shell
if ($result -ne $null){write-host "Mailbox Created Sucessfully"}
else{write-host "Error Creating Mailbox check command Line for Details"}

}


$OUhash1 = @{ }
$MBhash1 = @{ }

$form = new-object System.Windows.Forms.form
$form.Text = "Exchange 2007 Quick User Create Form"
$form.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(430,400)

# Add UserName Box
$unUserNameTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$unUserNameTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,30)
$unUserNameTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$form.Controls.Add($unUserNameTextBox)

# Add Username Lable
$unUserNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$unUserNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,30)
$unUserNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$unUserNamelableBox.Text = "Username UPN"
$form.Controls.Add($unUserNamelableBox)

# Add Alias Box
$emAliasTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$emAliasTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,60)
$emAliasTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$form.Controls.Add($emAliasTextBox)

# Add Alias Lable
$emAliaslableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$emAliaslableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,60)
$emAliaslableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$emAliaslableBox.Text = "Alias"
$form.Controls.Add($emAliaslableBox)

# Add FirstName Box
$unFirstNameTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$unFirstNameTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,90)
$unFirstNameTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$form.Controls.Add($unFirstNameTextBox)

# Add FirstName Lable
$unFirstNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$unFirstNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,90)
$unFirstNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(60,20)
$unFirstNamelableBox.Text = "First Name"
$form.Controls.Add($unFirstNamelableBox)

# Add LastName Box
$lnLastNameTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$lnLastNameTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,120)
$lnLastNameTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$form.Controls.Add($lnLastNameTextBox)

# Add LastName Lable
$lnLastNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$lnLastNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,120)
$lnLastNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(60,20)
$lnLastNamelableBox.Text = "Last Name"
$form.Controls.Add($lnLastNamelableBox)

# Add DisplayName Box
$dsDisplayNameTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$dsDisplayNameTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,150)
$dsDisplayNameTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$form.Controls.Add($dsDisplayNameTextBox)

# Add DisplayName Lable
$dsDisplayNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$dsDisplayNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,150)
$dsDisplayNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$dsDisplayNamelableBox.Text = "Display Name"
$form.Controls.Add($dsDisplayNamelableBox)

# Add OU Drop Down
$ouOuNameDrop = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox
$ouOuNameDrop.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,180)
$ouOuNameDrop.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(230,30)
$ouOuNameDrop.Items.Add("/Users")
$OUhash1.Add("/Users","Users")
$root = [ADSI]''
$searcher = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher($root)
$searcher.Filter = '(objectClass=organizationalUnit)'
$searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("canonicalName")
$searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("Name")
$searcher1 = $searcher.FindAll()
foreach ($person in $searcher1){
[string]$ent = $person.Properties.canonicalname
$OUhash1.Add($ent.substring($ent.indexof("/"),$ent.length-$ent.indexof("/")),$ent)
$ouOuNameDrop.Items.Add($ent.substring($ent.indexof("/"),$ent.length-$ent.indexof("/")))
}
$form.Controls.Add($ouOuNameDrop)

# Add OU DropLable
$ouOuNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$ouOuNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,180)
$ouOuNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$ouOuNamelableBox.Text = "OU Name"
$form.Controls.Add($ouOuNamelableBox)

# Add Server Drop Down
$snServerNameDrop = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox
$snServerNameDrop.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,210)
$snServerNameDrop.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,30)
get-mailboxserver | ForEach-Object{$snServerNameDrop.Items.Add($_.Name)}
$snServerNameDrop.Add_SelectedValueChanged({
$msMailStoreDrop.Items.Clear()
get-mailboxdatabase -Server $snServerNameDrop.SelectedItem.ToString()| ForEach-Object{$msMailStoreDrop.Items.Add($_.Name)
$MBhash1.add($_.Name,$_.ServerName + "\" + $_.StorageGroup.Name + "\" + $_.Name)
}
})
$form.Controls.Add($snServerNameDrop)

# Add Server DropLable
$snServerNamelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$snServerNamelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,210)
$snServerNamelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$snServerNamelableBox.Text = "ServerName"
$form.Controls.Add($snServerNamelableBox)

# Add MailStore Drop Down
$msMailStoreDrop = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox
$msMailStoreDrop.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,240)
$msMailStoreDrop.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,30)
$form.Controls.Add($msMailStoreDrop)

# Add MailStore DropLable
$msMailStorelableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$msMailStorelableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,240)
$msMailStorelableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,20)
$msMailStorelableBox.Text = "Mail-Store"
$form.Controls.Add($msMailStorelableBox)

# Add Password Box
$pwPassWordTextBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.TextBox
$pwPassWordTextBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,270)
$pwPassWordTextBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(130,20)
$pwPasswordTextBox.UseSystemPasswordChar = $true
$form.Controls.Add($pwPassWordTextBox)

# Add Password Lable
$pwPassWordlableBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label
$pwPassWordlableBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,270)
$pwPassWordlableBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(60,20)
$pwPassWordlableBox.Text = "Password"
$form.Controls.Add($pwPassWordlableBox)

# Add Create Button

$crButton = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Button
$crButton.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(110,310)
$crButton.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,23)
$crButton.Text = "Create Mailbox"
$crButton.Add_Click({CreateMailbox})
$form.Controls.Add($crButton)

$form.topmost = $true
$form.Add_Shown({$form.Activate()})
$form.ShowDialog()

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All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.