Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

This is the first of the sample scripts I included in my MEC talk last Monday.  This script uses 3 of the new operations in EWS in Exchange 2013 to export all the address list entries of a particular Addresslist to individual Vcards (including the user photo) using just EWS. None of these operations are included in the EWS Managed API, so to use these operations I'm using some Raw SOAP and posting the EWS request using the standard httpwebrequest class in .Net and processing the response in XML. The FindPeople Operation is used firstly to page through all the entries in an Address list in groups of 100 entries at a time. To use this operation you first need to get the GUID for the address list you want to export and hard code this in the $ABGUID variable eg. $ABGUID = "6c118670-2f72-4213-944c-ab1e97d63f9b"; To get the GUID for your Global Address List you need to use the Get-GlobalAddressList Cmdlet  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996579%28v=exchg.150...

In previous versions of Exchange accessing the Directory (or Global Address List) with EWS was limited to just resolving a specific entry or expanding a Distribution list. In Exchange 2013 the concept of the persona's has been introduced  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exchange/jj190898%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx . To distill this down a little a persona allows you to have a Contact that can pull its related information from multiple sources while previously everything was just stored in one object in the Exchange Store. There are a number of new EWS operations to go along with personas and the Unified Contact Store the most interesting of these is the FindPeople operation which allows you to do something you couldn't do previously which is enumerate the entire GAL (or any other address list).  At this point I should make the point that the GAL is just one of the data sources that FindPeople can search you can also include searching t...

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...