Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

I've covered this one before using other Exchange API's and versions but here's a potentially useful script if you want to create a folder in a Mailbox with a powershell/EWS script. To avoid any errors it does a search of the target folder where your going to create the subfolder first. Although this isn't 100% needed as the error you will get if it does exist is pretty self explanatory its good practice to do this anyway The script like many others I've posted uses the currently logged on user to then access another mailbox using Delegate access. I've included two versions one is feed via the Get-Mailbox cmdlet so this could potentially be used to add a folder for every mailbox on a particular server (as long as you have rights). I've put a download of the script here the script which if feed via get-mailbox looks like function CreateFolder($MailboxName) { "Mailbox Name : " + $MailboxName $folderid = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServi...

Change is one of the universal constants that we all must constantly deal within our working lives, another one is poor communication and dysfunctions HR departments bit like death and tax's really. This often leads to us hapless mail administrator wondering why when company staff numbers remain stable the number of mailboxes seem to grow exponentially over time. Those that seek to find unused mailboxes are often confronted with a somewhat challenging task because of the nature of the challenging environment we work in for example sickness, maternity (and paternity leave), gap years and a number of other flexible work scenarios where mailboxes may appear to be unused but should not be deleted. Over the last decade I've had a few cracks at writing scripts to do this at first just looking at the number of unread email, the looking at both send and received and then finally looking at all of these and then the last logon time while all shared some modicum of success at time they f...

One of all the more useful reasons to learn scripting is the ability to turn information that is recorded in one format in a seemless useless rable of bits, into a format this is more useful to ordinary humans in everyday situations. One the examples of this are the IIS logs which in Exchange contain information about users accessing OWA, Accessing ActiveSync and Outlook Anywhere. Like everything in IT there are a few ways of tackling how you go about turing log information into something useful, one of the more popular ways to do this is using the Log parser which is a brilliant tool for those that aren't comfortable doing a lot of coding. You cant beat this tool for speed and efficiency and if your parsing logs often you should learn to use it. More recently the exLogAnalyser has been released which is interesting and it looks like a really great piece of coding that lacks a very very important ingredients for a tool like this. The documentation is spartan and it was written ...

Every complicated thing in life is made up of smaller simpler building blocks, when it comes to writing a script (or any code really) the more of these little building blocks you have to figure out the more the process of solving a problem can become bewildering. The Internet generally provides you with lots of half eaten sandwiches of information something someone else has taken a bite out but a lot of the time half done, and as with any code its usefulness declines over time as new and better API's and methods are derived. In this post I'm going to go through a simple scripted process that hopefully covers a few more of these smaller building blocks that you might face when asked to come up with a simple costless solution to perform an automated business function with a script. So the process im going to look at is one that comes up a lot and that is you have an Email that comes into to certain mailbox every day with a certain subject in my case "Daily Export" this ...

While the Exchange Management Shell is a thing of wonder its not always available when your writing a script or piece of real code and you need to do something like finding your Exchange 2007/2010 CAS or Mailbox role servers. The good news is like most of the Exchange configuration information this is stored in Active directory and can be relatively easily queried using LDAP and ADSI. The AD property that holds this information about what particular roles are installed on a Exchange server is the msExchCurrentServerRoles property. This property contain a number of bitwise flags that indicate which roles are installed as per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123496(EXCHG.80).aspx . Server role Role value Mailbox role 2 Client Access role (CAS) 4 Unified Messaging role 16 Hub Transport role 32 Edge Transport role 64 So to query these in ADSI we need to use a Bitwise filter as per http://support.micros...

The ability to change and customise the default configuration of OWA is an often sort out and in previous versions of Exchange hard to achieve task. Especially for those with Large Exchange Orgs and standardised training or custom security requirements where the default settings come into conflict with other policies. Underlying a lot of OWA configuration settings are stored in FAI items (folder associated items) in a users mailbox using the Configuration Information Protocol Specification documented in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc463899(EXCHG.80).aspx . Along with the ability to access FAI items which was previously not possible in Exchange 2007 using EWS, Exchange 2010 also introduces a new UserConfiguration Operation in EWS that provides some Typed objects the makes dealing with configuration objects a lot easier and safer for those that wish to do so. ( I still wouldn't guarantee the support response you would get if you do use these Operations and stuff your Exch...

Contact photo's where a feature first introduced in Outlook 2003 but up until the release on Exchange 2010 not something you could use in EWS. This should not be confused with another new feature in Exchange 2010 which is the ability to upload a picture to the Gal (or the directory to be more precise) if your interested in finding out more about that check out Ilse post . So the Contact photo's I'm talking about are those that are associated with contact Items in your mailbox. About 4 years ago i posted this script (which was rubbish) for doing this with CDO 1.2 importantly in the heady stile of 2005 i pointed out that when using contact photos you need to set some extended properties on the attachment. Now while you still can't do this with EWS :( in 2010 they have added the ability to set the properties of a contact photo(just wish they hadn't stopped there). Further the EWS Managed API actually makes the process of adding a contact photo quite easy. So a very s...