Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

While this is now something you can do in one line in Exchange 2007 and 2010 if your migrating or managing 2000/3 you may want to get the Size and Item Count details of one particular mailbox folder for all users on a server eg how big the Inbox,SentItems or Calendar folder is. In Exchange 2003 you could get the Mailbox Size via WMI but to get an individual folder size you need to access the Mailbox itself (eg you can use pfdavadmin etc). To do this via Power shell for all users on the server you first need an ADSI query to get all the mailboxes on a particular server then you can use with WebDAV via the virtual admin root or MAPI via RDO\Redemption  http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/ which works well in Powershell. I have two scripts that use show how do to this using each of these API's which I've posted a downloadable copy here To run these scripts you need to use the Netbios name of the server as a commandline parameter the RDO version of the script looks like $snServer...

Last month i posted a script for getting the Iphone IOS version information for all users on a server using the Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics cmdlet which worked okay but had one major flaw in that it doesn't pick up the updates to the O/S as pointed out in http://www.hedonists.ca/2010/07/22/blocking-the-iphone-part-i. So the only 100% way would be to parse the IIS logs where you can grab the same information about the devices as long as the cs-useragent is being include in the logs (if not you need to change this). This script is still useful for somethings and hopefully i should be able to re-purpose this to do something useful. There are good and bad things about parsing logs, the good is that this technique should work on any version of Exchange including 2003 the bad is that if your log files are large then there are much better ways then using Powershell to parse them (such as logparser). But using PS does have a number of advantages and if your whiling to wait while the s...

Group membership has long been used in directory services to provide a way of giving access to different objects, distribution lists and a variety of other useful things to solve everyday problems in both active directory and Exchange Infrastructures. There are a number of things that you can’t do with Groups in Exchange which can be slightly limiting if you’re trying to solve certain problems in an easy and flexible manner. Exchange provides a whole bunch of extended properties in Active directory that can be used for various things one of the more useful of this is being able to apply a specific proxyaddress based on a specific value set in a extended property via a recipient policy. It can also be useful in Transport Agents and Transport Rules and a number of different application uses. For example in most mail systems you will have logical grouping of users into distribution lists maybe loosely based on department function etc. If for example your sales department want to use a spe...

ProxyAddresses are something in Exchange environments that can be a challenge to maintain over a long period of time and also during migrations or consolidations something that you need to deal with. If your lucky then just modifying your recipient policies may work the magic that you need if not and you have a large number of users that you need to modify you need to look at creating a script or doing a lot of mouse work. The first challenge if your going to write a script to do this is because your going to be deleting information just doing a one-liner or simple script may mean you will end up removing more information than you want. So one way to tackle this is using a simple GUI script that will allow mutiple selects to at least control what and which accounts you are going to affect. The good thing about createing a simple Gui is that it can also be used to do some analysis first. So the script i've created allows you to search based on the proxy address domain you want t...

During the course of migrating from one version of Exchange to the another version of Exchange or just moving between servers you might come across the need to shift some of your OultookAnywhere users who are proxying through one CAS server to another without taking the existing CAS server offline and letting autodiscover sort it out. Well i did so here's how you can do it First of all this script only works if you can connect to the target pc via WMI remotly and access the registry. If this is all good here's what the script needs to do . First things first is you need to work out the machine name of the PC you want to connect to and the username of the user you want to move. Eg Get-Logonstatitics | select Username,ClientIpAddress should provide that (you may have to use the IISlog files to workout if they are using OutlookAnywhere). Now we have the hostname orIpAddress of the machine we want to target we now need to work out the SID of the user. Why you ask well where going t...

Logs files are great things but as with a lot of things the hidden value of these resources is often hard to see at there face value. I had a very simple problem this week where i needed to know which users where using Outlook Anywhere and what their IPAddress where. For this the IIS logs could more then provide an answer for this but these log files and get quite large and contain a mix of different information not just Outlook http/rpc traffic. One of the main challenges you have when looking at IIS logs files is that depending on who enabled logging the Fields and the order they are being logged in may differ. So a parser/script you write to work against one set of logs might not work against another server. To solve this problem is quite simple when a log file is created at the top of the log file on line 4 is written the field format for the file. So if you first read this line parse it into a Hashtable and index it by the fieldname we then know what the index array value will be ...

Haven't posted any 2003 scripts for a while so here's one that might be useful especially if your looking at doing a bit of documentation before a migration. There are a few tricks when your using ADSI scripts to get information eg if you want to get the OU check the parent object of the userObject. Or if you want to get the Storage Group use the Parent of the MailStore object. If you want to work out quotas check both the mailstore and the user object. To put this all together into a script that takes the username as a parameter it looks like this I've put a download of this code here . param([String] $samaccountname) $root = [ADSI]'LDAP://RootDSE' $dfDefaultRootPath = "LDAP://" + $root.DefaultNamingContext.tostring() $dfRoot = [ADSI]$dfDefaultRootPath $gfGALQueryFilter = "(&(&(&(& (mailnickname=*)(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(samaccountname=" + $samaccountname + ")))))" $dfsearcher = new-object System.Dire...

Each night most Exchange servers will run a scheduled maintenance operation which among other things does an online de-fragmentation of the Exchange Store, and removes deleted items and mailboxes that are past the stores configured retention periods. The result of these operations are logged to the event log with some interesting information about how much whitespace the online defrag operation recovered, the size of the retained items and retained deleted mailboxes remaining in the store. I've used these before in VBS here to do this in powershell is pretty easy. Lets jump into some code samples this is how you can get the whitepace in a Exchange store by querying the event logs via WMI for 1221 Event Log ids and then parsing the Size out of the event log message. $WmidtQueryDT = [System.Management.ManagementDateTimeConverter]::ToDmtfDateTime([DateTime]::UtcNow.AddDays(-3)) Get-WmiObject -computer servername -query ("Select * from Win32_NTLogEvent Where Logfile='Applica...

I've been looking at rewriting some message tracking scripts and one the things that's helpfull when you are doing message tracking is having some nice flashy visuals to help you out. Now there are some nice 3rd party packages out there like powergadgets who will separate you from your money and also the WPF framework stuff that give you some charting functionality. But if you want something that's free and will work from any workstation/server that has powershell and a Internet connection then its hard to go past Google Charts . Once you work you way around the different URL options its pretty much just a matter of creating some code to build the URL. So to put this into something that is actually useful here's a couple of samples that first generate Rate information from the message tracking log files on Exchange 2003 using the wonder of WMI and on Exchange 2007 using the Exchange Management Shell get-messagetrackinglog cmdlet. The script itself is pretty simple it u...

If you haven’t been able to implement Mailbox quotas in your Exchange organization then you will probably find some users are using a large percentage of the used (or allocated space) in your Exchange database when compared to other users. If you work out this on a percentage basis this information can come in handy if you want to try to charge back to certain groups the cost of storing that information. E.g. you use this percentage of the resource so you pay this percentage of the cost (tell him he’s dreaming). I’ve put together a couple of scripts to help show this information as well as some other basic information about the user. The first couple of scripts show all the important information about a particular user. It takes one parameter which is the samaccountname and then does a AD Lookup and returns information about what Server the users mailbox is on what version of Exchange that mailserver is running what mailstore the mailbox is located in and what storage group that mailst...