Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Continuing on from my previous post about posting your current Exchange calendar appointments as twitter status updates this script explores some more creative uses of the Twitter and Exchange 2007 API's. This script will read your current Twitter account details and grab your friend’s timeline and then create emails in your inbox (or other folder of choice) for each update in your friends twitter timelines (or the people your following). To match up the Received time of the email with the time the status update is posted on Twitter the script sets the necessary mapi properties to make the message appear that it was received at the same time as the status update was posted. To keep track of which updates have been created as email it downloads the latest feed and then on each run it uses Xpath to read the XML file and loads a hashtable which is used to ensure that no status update is created as an email twice. To access Exchange and create the messages in the inbox from the twitt...

Public folders are a great thing they increase the functionality of an Exchange server and while they can cause some support issues it’s great to see they will still be included in the next version of Exchange (it would be great to see them embraced as a feature instead of a burden as they provide some unique functionality you don’t get on other mail systems). One thing that Public folders can be used for is shared address lists with Outlook supporting the ability to add a Public Folder as an address list location in the Outlook Address Book. OWA has never provided this same functionality but for 2003 I came up with a small unsupported (hack) customization to add a public folder search option to the find address function see this post. On 2007 OWA was rewritten and WebDAV is no longer used by any of the OWA code but using the same underlying methods a similar public folder search option can be made available in 2007. Like before this involves modifying some of the OWA files which is ...

The Reading pane (or preview pane) is one the features of the premium version of Outlook Web Access on 2007. Due to Security or bandwidth (or other) worries you may want to turn this off on particular folders for your users (although they will still be able to still turn this back on using OWA). There is no global way of turnin it off so you need to modify the property that controls this on each folder you want to be affected. The property that controls the Preview pane is http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/preview this doesn't get set by default so in the absence of this property the preview pane is on. If the property does exist it will be one of three values 0 - Preview Pane is off 1 - Preview Pane set to rights 2 - Preview Pane set to bottom To set this property you can use any of the Exchange API's on 2007 the best API to use is EWS in C# if you wanted to set this property you would need to use the following property definition in a FolderUpdate Operation P...

Following on from last week I’m going to put the Sync function I created into use and also show you how to create a contact in Powershell with a few lines of code using some wrappered EWS code I’ve put into my EWSUtil powershell library. I’ve also include some code to create a grouped list of contacst flagged with a custom property to allow full sync eg create if don’t exist create , delete if deleted from the syncfile and do property level changes if phone, address of name information is modified. I’ve used a csv file generated by doing an export in Outlook Express but this could be any csv file from any source. Before we can use this process we need to set the target folder to where the contacts will be imported to or where the contacts we are going to sync with are located. For a local users contact folder something like this is needed. $lcLocalContactFolderid = new-object EWSUtil.EWS.DistinguishedFolderIdType $lcLocalContactFolderid .Id = [EWSUtil.EWS.DistinguishedFolderIdN...

** If your using Exchange 2010 see http://gsexdev.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/howto-series-sample-1-unused-mailbox.html ** Finding unused mailboxes is one of those mind numbing tasks a Sys Admin must perform routinely in Large Exchange organizations. Many of the scripts on this blog help to show ways to tackle different issues around unused or disabled mailboxes such as removing disabled users accounts from groups or finding broken delegate forwarding rules etc. I've also posted a few scripts before that showed some methods to track down unused mailboxes by looking at the number of unread email and the last time a mailbox sent a message. Well this script puts some of these methods together in a powershell GUI script that uses Exchange Web Services and some Exchange Management Shell cmdlets to look at all mailboxes on a server and show us information about when a mailbox was logged into, how big it is, how many unread email there is and when the last sent and/or received email was. ...