Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

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...

A quick one from the mail bag if you are creating public folders using Exchange Web Services and you want these folders to be mail enalbed without needing to use the Exchange Management Shell or the Public Folder Management console in SP1. Then you can still do this using the same method that worked in Exchange 2000/3 by setting the following two Mapi properties PR_PUBLISH_IN_ADDRESS_BOOK = 0x3FE6000B PR_PF_PROXY_REQUIRED = 0x671F000B So in a CreateFolder Request you need something like CreateFolderType cfCreateFolder = new CreateFolderType(); PathToExtendedFieldType PR_PUBLISH_IN_ADDRESS_BOOK = new PathToExtendedFieldType(); PR_PUBLISH_IN_ADDRESS_BOOK.PropertyTag = "0x3FE6"; PR_PUBLISH_IN_ADDRESS_BOOK.PropertyType = MapiPropertyTypeType.Boolean; PathToExtendedFieldType PR_PF_PROXY_REQUIRED = new PathToExtendedFieldType(); PR_PF_PROXY_REQUIRED.PropertyTag = "0x671F"; PR_PF_PROXY_REQUIRED.PropertyType = MapiPropertyTypeType.Boolean; ExtendedPropertyType ...

A number of years ago i posted some scripts to create RSS feeds from public folders and calendar folders using Exchange event sinks and some pretty simple VBS. These scripts where pretty simple and worked pretty well and I've still got some running today. On Exchange 2007 development technologies have moved on and so its time to move these scripts along as well. The big advantage is that with Powershell, .NET 2.0 and Exchange Web Services the flexibility or what you can do and therefore what you can then leverage with the newer advances in the .NET framework offer you a pretty nice sandpit to play in. The reality of this increase in flexibility is unfortunately an increase also in the complexity meaning that this reasonably simple VBS script becomes a little more complicated and while its possible to put together a script using SOAP strings it can be a pain to make this reusable and reliable in wide number of scenarios. To make this easier i've included the EWS routine's ...

Over the years one of the most popular and useful scripts i've written and gotten feedback and questions on is the various mailbox size scripts i've posted here and on Outlookexchange. The fact that this functionality has been pulled from the GUI in Exchange 2007 doesn't appear to have been a very popular decision amongst sysadmins i guess the majority of which don't want to look at a line of code or script. While this blog/post isn't probably for those people If you are really ruing the loss of Mailbox size information out of the GUI don't think about what you have lost but whats been gained through the flexibility of Powershell and the Exchange Cmdlets. GUI's are great for displaying simple information but anyone who's been working in IT for any length of time knows that requests are rarely simple and not always logical when dealing with management. Trying to make information you export from a GUI display the way you want can be time consuming and ted...

I’ve had a couple of questions about this one based on a previous post that no-one really seemed to understand (oh and there was a bug in the code in post). Permissions aren't an easy subject and EWS doesn’t really give a straight forward method of manipulating ACL's but once you understand the basics its generally functional. It’s one thing you do need to dedicate some time too to get your logic right. I posted a calendar permissions helper for powershell a couple of months back I thought this would be a pretty simple task but when I started to test the library it ended up taking a numbers of hours to get the logic right. To summarize the things to watch out for when setting permission via EWS two important points are. The first is that the ACE’s for the EWS security roles enumerations and Outlook roles don’t match. There are only sutle differences but if you need these roles to marry up in Outlook you need to include your own routines to do this. When you want to modify...

***** If your running Exchange 2010 please see http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2010/03/mailbox-size-gui-exchange-2010-remote.html ******** Okay time for a new version of the mailbox size gui the last version had a number of large bugs and the quota code looked like it had been written by a drunk squirrel. So this version firstly fixes the bugs in the quota code and the bugs with Deleted items sizes and adds some new functionality. The first addition is a drop down box that allows selection of which quota value you want to report on Eg exchange offers 3 quota levels Warning, Prohibit Send and Prohibit Send and Receive so the script will now allow reporting on which ever Quota usage you want to look at. This section still needs a little work to get better performance as it re-queries the server for mailbox sizes when you change the quota dropdown box instead of just reusing the current result. The second and most exciting feature is the mailbox size growth feature this is the biggest ch...