Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Copying a Contact in Exchange is one thing synchronizing is another this can be one of the great contradictions and issues that faces anybody looking at synchronizing contacts between different storage mediums. Whether that be a Database, CSV file or other Mail System underlying its the same information stored and accessed in a different way. Because Exchange isn't your normal flat file database more a relatively complex property store that uses some complex datatypes doing property level synchronization does provide a unique set of challenges. Exchange Web Service presents some of these properties in more workable format but apart from this doesn't give a lot of help is solving this fundamental issue. The SyncFolderItem and notification operations only provide an Item level ability to spot changes on an item so the brave souls who want to embark on a greater level of synchronization must take this challenge unto themselves. If your going to compare two contacts it first helps

** If your using Exchange 2010 see http://gsexdev.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/howto-series-sample-1-unused-mailbox.html ** Finding unused mailboxes is one of those mind numbing tasks a Sys Admin must perform routinely in Large Exchange organizations. Many of the scripts on this blog help to show ways to tackle different issues around unused or disabled mailboxes such as removing disabled users accounts from groups or finding broken delegate forwarding rules etc. I've also posted a few scripts before that showed some methods to track down unused mailboxes by looking at the number of unread email and the last time a mailbox sent a message. Well this script puts some of these methods together in a powershell GUI script that uses Exchange Web Services and some Exchange Management Shell cmdlets to look at all mailboxes on a server and show us information about when a mailbox was logged into, how big it is, how many unread email there is and when the last sent and/or received email was.

If there was one thing i would change if I could redesign email from the ground up it would have to be NDR's. While these delivery reports are functional in what they do from a user and even an administrative prospective they are horribly disfunctional. While there isn't much you can do around the underlying design of NDR's with a little help from your favourite Exchange API there are certain tasks that can be made more livable. NDR Overload If your users are sending and receiving a lot of email they you'll probably find that a number of NDR's are being generated for a vast number of different reasons. A lot of the times the loop will get closed where your user having tryed and failed to decipher what the NDR says gives up and calls the helpdesk. If your sending a copy of NDR's to a central mailbox what can be usefull for everybody concerned is to have a digest list of all the NDR's that have been recieved in a certain time frame this can allow you to do