Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

With great pride and a little trepidation I'd like to introduce my new venture Data Rumble and our first software release Message Tracking Outllook Addin for Office 365. As a company we are looking to focus on email data so looking at the Metadata an Email message picks up and leaves behind while its in transit to and from a mailbox is the logical first step for us. Launching something new is a lot of work so this first release is a bit of dry run to get all the underlying infrastructure and procedures in place. At release the main feature of this AddIn is that it allows you to perform a Message Trace on a Message from within Outlook itself using the Office365 Reporting Web Service . This is a REST endpoint that allows you to perform a number of different Office365 Administrative reporting tasks it has been around for a couple of years now and pre dates some of the oauth features that the newer mailbox REST services have so I expect the Endpoint will ch...

Being able to tell how much bandwidth a particular server has consumed over a period of time is quite handy when your in a pinch and trying to work out where your bandwidth is being consumed. It can also be used in a wider context when trying to work what particular patterns and pressures are happening on particular server. The latter requiring a a more lateral analysis of the data. Exchange 2007 does a good job of logging message tracking information but these create a chalenge of filtering down this information into what been sent/received and how much bandwidth being used. The first things this script does is grabs all the message tracking records for a particular time period for a paricular server (based on a cmdline parameter you pass it). It then filters just on Sent and Recieved Email and then uses a hashtable and some other filtering code to count the number of email sent and recieved based on recpients of a message (eg a message sent to 5 external recipients will be count 5 ...

Unlocking the secrets from the depths of the Message Tracking Logs is an ever recurring theme on this blog and in general an important area of Exchange Server Management. In this latest incarnation we boldly go where no Message Tracking application has gone before as well as the normal aggregation, graphing and exports bits and pieces. The new functionality this script introduces expands on post I was talking about a couple of weeks ago which is Using Exchange Web Services to Enhance Exchange Message Tracking . So what we end up is a GUI that does aggregation and filtering and then the ability to look at the content of a particular message by using EWS to find the message based on its message-ID and then being able to see the Subject,Body and then export attachments or the whole message as an EML file. As this is version one i haven't quite go around to making the message search do a Deleted Item Scan (Dumpster Dive) and there is also an issue with Sent Items where the Clients i...

Message Tracking from an operation perspective is one of the most useful windows you have into what's happening on your Exchange server. Used skillfully these logs can tell you firstly that your server is operating correctly eg you are receiving messages and people are sending messages, how much data is coming in, going between, and going out of your network via Email. And when the inevitable problem happens and a message is delayed or not delivered message tracking becomes one of the most import tools for diagnosis. But Message tracking logs are only a fraction of the information that is contained on a message at the point of time it was traversing the Transport pipeline. But if you combine Message Tracking with an Exchange Store API like Exchange Web Services you suddenly have a very powerful tool that can give you an unlimited amount of flexibility to audit,analysis and take action on your environment. Okay I maybe getting a little over enthusiastic but this is one area i thin...

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...

In the past I’ve written and shown many ways to use Message tracking Log data in Exchange 2000-2003 using the WMI MessageTrackingLog class. With Exchange 2007 the WMI class is now gone replaced with a new Exchange Management Shell Powershell cmdlet. Although losing the richness of WQL is a little bit of shame the new cmdlet is pretty funky especially the little status bar (that’s gold). Message Tracking Logs can have many uses none more so then showing you current mailbox activity like who is actively sending and receiving mail in the last X number of minutes which may be important to you if you are working late at night on a server and you need to know who is active. This is my first go at a messagetracking log script for 2007 and I must admit I’m lacking some good load data at the moment for Exchange 2007. What this script does is creates a winform with a few Date and Time controls and populates a Drop down box with the names of the Exchange servers within an Exchange organiz...