Skip to main content

Basic Powershell script to show appointments from a calendar using the EWS Managed API

One of the more common tasks you might turn to use one of the Exchange API's for is to enumerate appointments in one or more users calendars. This can be useful for a number of reasons and applications and scripts, the EWS Managed API makes getting calendar appointment pretty easy using a script once you understand a few of the fundamentals around how calendar appointment's are stored.

Appointments unlike messages are more complex objects eg where an email would only represent one object in a folder an appointment if its recurring or a recurring exception or a deleted occurrence could represent one more calendar appointments. So its important not just to do a finditems query like you would with Email messages as this will return just the base instances of each appointment object. What you should do when querying for calendar appointments is its important to use a CalendarView, what this means is that when you query for appointments you specify a date range (start and end) for the appointments you what to retrieve and EWS will handle expanding any recurring appointments,deleted occurrences etc and return you what is essentially what you would see in Outlook (which does the same thing). This is a rather simplified explanation if you want to read more check out this sample chapter from Inside Exchange Web Services which is available on MSDN.

So when it comes to putting all this together in Powershell script that will pull all the appointments from a specific calendar we first need to specify the SMTP address of a mailbox you want to access and a Date range you want to check in a few variables

$MailboxName = "gscales@domain.com"
$StartDate = new-object System.DateTime(2009, 08, 01)
$EndDate = new-object System.DateTime(2009, 11, 01)

or maybe you want to look at the appointment for next week

$StartDate = new-object [System.DateTime]::Now
$EndDate = new-object [System.DateTime]::Now.AddDays(7)

Connect to EWS using the currently logged on Credentials the assumes that this account has access to the mailbox is question.

$dllpath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.0\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll"
[void][Reflection.Assembly]::LoadFile($dllpath)
$service = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeService([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExchangeVersion]::Exchange2007_SP1)

$windowsIdentity = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
$sidbind = "LDAP://<SID=" + $windowsIdentity.user.Value.ToString() + ">"
$aceuser = [ADSI]$sidbind

$service.AutodiscoverUrl($aceuser.mail.ToString())

Then you need to specify the calendarview object to use

$folderid = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.FolderId([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.WellKnownFolderName]::Calendar,$MailboxName)
$CalendarFolder = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.CalendarFolder]::Bind($service,$folderid)
$cvCalendarview = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.CalendarView($StartDate,$EndDate,2000)

and finally query the calendar and return the appointments

$cvCalendarview.PropertySet = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$frCalendarResult = $CalendarFolder.FindAppointments($cvCalendarview)
foreach ($apApointment in $frCalendarResult.Items){
$psPropset = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.PropertySet([Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.BasePropertySet]::FirstClassProperties)
$apApointment.load($psPropset)
"Appointment : " + $apApointment.Subject.ToString()
"Start : " + $apApointment.Start.ToString()
"End : " + $apApointment.End.ToString()
"Organizer : " + $apApointment.Organizer.ToString()
"Required Attendees :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.RequiredAttendees){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
"Optional Attendees :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.OptionalAttendees){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
"Resources :"
foreach($attendee in $apApointment.Resources){
" " + $attendee.Address
}
" "
}

I've put a download of the script here.


Popular posts from this blog

The MailboxConcurrency limit and using Batching in the Microsoft Graph API

If your getting an error such as Application is over its MailboxConcurrency limit while using the Microsoft Graph API this post may help you understand why. Background   The Mailbox  concurrency limit when your using the Graph API is 4 as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/throttling#outlook-service-limits . This is evaluated for each app ID and mailbox combination so this means you can have different apps running under the same credentials and the poor behavior of one won't cause the other to be throttled. If you compared that to EWS you could have up to 27 concurrent connections but they are shared across all apps on a first come first served basis. Batching Batching in the Graph API is a way of combining multiple requests into a single HTTP request. Batching in the Exchange Mail API's EWS and MAPI has been around for a long time and its common, for email Apps to process large numbers of smaller items for a variety of reasons.  Batching in the Graph is limited to a m

Sending a Message in Exchange Online via REST from an Arduino MKR1000

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You need to authorize it in you tenant (eg build a small ap

How to test SMTP using Opportunistic TLS with Powershell and grab the public certificate a SMTP server is using

Most email services these day employ Opportunistic TLS when trying to send Messages which means that wherever possible the Messages will be encrypted rather then the plain text legacy of SMTP.  This method was defined in RFC 3207 "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security" and  there's a quite a good explanation of Opportunistic TLS on Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_TLS .  This is used for both Server to Server (eg MTA to MTA) and Client to server (Eg a Message client like Outlook which acts as a MSA) the later being generally Authenticated. Basically it allows you to have a normal plain text SMTP conversation that is then upgraded to TLS using the STARTTLS verb. Not all servers will support this verb so if its not supported then a message is just sent as Plain text. TLS relies on PKI certificates and the administrative issue s that come around certificate management like expired certificates which is why I wrote th
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.