Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

When it comes to Messaging API's there no more complex thing then calendaring, not only because most vendors implement things a little differently but Exchange also has a little legacy feature drag because of its length of time in the market place and the difficulties in changing the technology and human interaction with it. The new REST API offers yet another window into calendaring on Office 365 and Exchange 2016 with a major security benefit over its predecessor which is the ability to be able to scope your application access so it can only access the Calendar folders in a Mailbox where previously apps may have needed to have Full Rights or impersonation rights on a Calendar. Also the new REST API allows you to interact with Group Calendars (or Teams Calendar) so leveraging the new REST API to value add to the adoption of these new features can be a worth your while. To Support Calendaring I've added 2 new cmdlets to the Exch-Rest module to handle creating Appointments and...

Someone asked an interesting question about recurring Appointments in Exchange recently that I thought I'd expand on a bit with blog post. Recurrence in Appointments,Meeting and Tasks are one of the more useful features of Exchange, but they are also one the features that are harder for developers and anybody writing code or scripts to get a handle on. These days there is some really good technical documentation on this so I won't explain too much but firstly  http://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/dn727655(v=exchg.150).aspx  but also the Exchange Protocol Document http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee201188(v=exchg.80).aspx  are a must to read. To refine this down a bit with Calendar Appointments if you have a recurring Appointment you don't have separate objects for each occurrence of the recurring Appointment, the recurrence is just a pattern stored in a property on what is called the master instance of that particular ...

One of the things that was announced at MEC recently was Microsoft's Cloud first strategy with Exchange, which basically means that new feature will appear in Exchange Online first and then at some later date make their way into the OnPremise version of Exchange. One of these new cloud first features is the OData API for Mailbox data which is a REST based API for accessing mailbox data (as apposed to EWS which is a SOAP based API for accessing mailbox data). JSON and REST have become the standard for building WebAPI's over the past few years and every man and his dog (Google, Facebook,Twitter,Apple etc) are now using this so its exciting to see Exchange make this move. If you want to find out more about it and you have a couple of hours to watch some good video's I would check the following two presentations from MEC http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MEC/2014/EXT301 and   http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MEC/2014/EXT304 which will give you a good grounding in both oD...

I've had a few questions about this in the past week so I thought I would put together a quick sample to show how you can create a new Folder is EWS and set the FolderClass so it appears as a Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes or whatever other folder you want. This is a function so you can just cut and paste it into your own script to use. The full script looks like the following which has samples of using the function at the bottom. ## Get the Mailbox to Access from the 1st commandline argument       $MailboxName  =  $args [0]      ## Load Managed API dll      Add-Type -Path  "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\Web Services\1.2\Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.dll"           ## Set Exchange Version      $ExchangeVersion  = [Micro...

The following sample demonstrates how you can query all the calendar appointments in a Mailbox and report on those appointments that have attachments, the number of attachments on each item, attachment Size and largest attachment details. Its uses the following AQS query to limit the result set EWS returns to only those appointments with attachments (this means the script will only run against Exchange 2010 or Exchange Online) $AQSString = "hasattachment:true" The script then does a batch GetItems to load all the details about attachments using the LoadPropertiesFromItems method. It then produces a report like the following To Run the script make sure you change the following variable to the mailbox you want to run against. $MailboxName = "user@domain.com" I've put a downloadable copy of this script here the script itself looks like. $MailboxName =  "user@domain.com"       $rptcollection = @()   ## Load...