Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

For those of you who have ever wished to see what it takes to build some of the more advanced scripts that i post on this blog as part of the Connections Online conference I put together the following talk http://videos.devconnections.com/product/Exchange-Management-Shell-Beyond-the-One-Liner,5789-3.aspx . While i cant promise that this will teach you to be a guru in 60 minutes hopefully it may present a few different idea's and methods you may not have considered before and allow you to bash out a few more of your own scripts. There are also a lot of great videos on various aspects of Exchange posted by other Exchange MVP's that are defiantly worth checking out http://videos.devconnections.com/catalog/Exchange,390.aspx

With the recent release of the RC for the EWS Managed API there was one change that affected a lot of the scripts i've posted on this blog. While i will update them all in time if you have created any scripts of your own based on these you will need to look at making the following changes to allows your scripts to function correctly when you update to the RC of the Managed API. The change was In a FindItems call, the search filter now has to be passed as a parameter to FindItems, as opposed to being a property of ItemView So to put that in a powershell sample where before the search filter was a property of the view object you now need to create a seperate searchfilter object and the pass this as a parameter of the finditems overload. eg $Sf = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.SearchFilter+IsEqualTo([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.EmailMessageSchema]::IsRead, $false) $view = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ItemView(1) $findResults = $service.FindIte...

Along with the RC of Exchange 2010 this week the RC of the EWS Managed API made its debut. There are a number of changes some of which break a few of the scripts i've posted here there is full list of the changes on http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrdevelopment/thread/7053c628-9227-4cd5-ba9d-ed6fe8d484cb . But the good thing is now OOF and Freebusy work and the DNS lookup for autodisover is another major improvement. Setting the OOF is pretty easy with the API lets look at a few examples as before you first need to create a Service object and authenticate if you haven't used the EWS Managed API in Powershell before see this post as a primer. To use this OOF code you first need to download and install the RC version of the ManagedAPI from here . So lets take it as read we have our $service object now to get the Offsettings its just one call with the email address of the Account you want to pull the settings for. $oofSetting = $service.GetUserOofSetting...

If you have been administrating mail systems for a while (and then some) then you have probably had to do a bulk update or two of one or more AD properties like phone numbers and address information. Depending on the time you have and your skill at building scripts you may have had some good and not so good experiences at this. The frustrating thing can be a script you build for one problem maybe be completely useless for the next and you may find yourself again spending time you don’t have building another script. Well because I’ve had to do this one too many times I came up with the following little script that allows dynamic matching of columns in a CSV file to import data into Active Directory. The other thing this script does is actually checks the current value within AD as not to update an already existing property and it’s a latched script so doesn’t allow you to update anything without clicking yes. The later could get frustrating but it’s a lot less frustrating then trying to...

As twitter is now more a part of the everyday rather than a flash in the pan it does give some new options for solving those time old problems the annoy us all. One of these is missing your meeting reminders or making sure your team or company don’t forget about any important calendar events if you have a company calendar or mailbox. Exchange and Outlook have always had a good functionality for tracking and setting reminders but human nature has something to do with us ignoring or not receiving them. So how can scripting and a little EWS code solve this well it first has to start with a query of the calendar where the appointments you want to search against are located. Because reminders can be set for 2 weeks before an appointment you need to query for appointments during this time frame. Then filter anything thats set to private and you have some appointments that might have reminders you need to twitter. But before this you first need to use a little maths x = minutesbeforeappointm...