Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Micro-Blogging is one of the Web 2.0 technologies that has been getting a bit of run of late its one of the tools a seemingly new breed of politicians are using to garner support and awareness of their movements. But its also used by a growing number of everyday people and businesses as a method of pervaying certain messages and other sometimes seemly useless pieces of information. Maybe one of the keys to twitter's success is it fills the gap between availibilty and straight calendaring. I think the scope of what could be done with twitter when you start to intergrate this into traditional communication technology should see this technology expand even more (well as long as we get some creative people pushing the limits). Exchange mostly provides the same type of information in different formats so using the Twitter API and the Exchange API's you can start to combine the functionality of both systems to start providing different new funcationality. Eg in this sample Im using...

If you’re using the built-in Content Filtering in Exchange 2007 on a Hub or Edge server you may want to take advantage of System white lists . But if you have used the Set-ContentFilterSetting cmdlet you may have noticed this isn't the most user friendly cmdlet. If you’re maintaining these lists on a regular basis you may really start to dislike the lack of a GUI well I certainly do so I built a pretty simple GUI to make managing the BypassedSenders and BypassedSenderDomains a more enjoyable experience. It’s pretty simple code first it uses Get-ContentFilterSetting to get the current setting of both of these properties and then displays then in a DatagridView. You can then add more entries or change existing entries by editing the flexGrid then when you hit the update button it will run back through the datagrid values and then creates a collection which is then used to update the ByPassedSenders or ByPassedSenderDomains properties. I've put a download of the script here the s...

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 ability to rewrite the from address of emails can be exceedingly useful if you are working with consolidating or migrating email systems especially if you have two (or more) companies merging or you're trying to consolidate disparate email system across orgs. Exchange 2007 has a great address rewriting agent that runs on a Edge server which is explained in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996806.aspx . If you aren't implementing an Edge server as part of your Exchange org then unfortunately you cant use this agent on a Hub server. One solution to this is that you write your own agent to do this which is what this post is about. Now that link I just pointed to has some very important information about the fields you should and shouldn't rewrite in an address rewriting Agent and the reason you shouldn't rewrite particular fields. The Return-Path is probably the one of most note and maybe the one people will tend to want to rewrite because of the visibility...

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...

This script takes a slightly different approach on some of the mailstore size and whitespace scripts that I've posted and a few others you may have seen posted around the traps. The great thing about scripting in the time of the WFC is that its free no budget required and the only limitation to what you can do is probably 1. your imagination 2. your skills. Given the WFC you should have much more time now to improve both (well at least the second). One of the new pressures that some admins maybe feeling in said WFC and the push towards virtulization is that the ratio of Servers to Admin is increasing so companies can at least from some perspective say they are cutting cost and raising efficacy of their IT teams. So what does this have to do with this script well... because its a new year its a good chance to review and rethink traditional approaches. Pretty much any size reporting script you will see will look at giving you the current size of various components of your mailboxes/...

Update version see here Firstly this isn't a new idea there's been a similar script on CDO live http://www.cdolive.com/inoutboard.htm for years that uses CDO 1.2. I've had a couple of people ask about doing this in Powershell and EWS using the new availability service on 2007 so here it is. How does it work To get the Free/Busy status of another mailbox in Exchange you need to make use of the getuseravailability operation in EWS. To be able to query another users availability you must have been granted rights to the free/busy information for that users Mailbox by default the default ACL gives users the right to see Free/Busy availability but not the newer Subject and Location information made available in 2007. To change the default Free/Busy Permission you can use something like this post A more granular approach would be to assign these rights to a specific user or group eg something like this would add a group to calendar if it didn't exist [void][Reflection.Assemb...