Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Update ** There is one problem with the script in this post in that its doesn't pick up the updates to the O/S as pointed out in http://www.hedonists.ca/2010/07/22/blocking-the-iphone-part-i . So the only 100% way would be to parse the IIS logs where you can grab the same information about the devices. I'll try to post a script that does parsing that should work on 2003 up. Thanks also to Dennis who sent another version of the script I've added to the download that give enhanced reporting** ** New scripted posted for IIS logs http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2010/08/parsing-iis-log-activesync-traffic-for.html ** On January 9, 2007 Apple released their first iphone and unleashed on the world what is arguably one of the most successful user mobile devices on the planet (I'm not arguing technical merit here just end user experience). Kind of like a virus these phones have spread throughout corporations and into every nook and cranny some with the IT departments blessing othe...

One of the more mind numbing tasks that Exchange administrators perform is creating new users and mailboxes. If you've ever been asked to create 5-10 users at the same time and are staring at a number of very repedative mouse clicks especially if you detests wizards then this script can help out. This is version 2 of this script i created a number of years ago that allowed creating just one user at at time this improves on this original idea by using a Datagrid instead so allowing you to enter multiple users and being able to create the users with just one click (well hopefully). Its also quite usefull in development enviroments where you might want to create a large number of users at once. The script itself is fairly simple in that it just wrappers a simple Winform around the create mailbox command and users a Datagrid for multiline input. I've put a download of the code here the script itself looks like [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing...

Group membership has long been used in directory services to provide a way of giving access to different objects, distribution lists and a variety of other useful things to solve everyday problems in both active directory and Exchange Infrastructures. There are a number of things that you can’t do with Groups in Exchange which can be slightly limiting if you’re trying to solve certain problems in an easy and flexible manner. Exchange provides a whole bunch of extended properties in Active directory that can be used for various things one of the more useful of this is being able to apply a specific proxyaddress based on a specific value set in a extended property via a recipient policy. It can also be useful in Transport Agents and Transport Rules and a number of different application uses. For example in most mail systems you will have logical grouping of users into distribution lists maybe loosely based on department function etc. If for example your sales department want to use a spe...

Its often useful with scripts and applications to be able to use Group membership to control what users are affected by a particular application or script. Enumerating nested group members in powershell seems to be a bit of art and there are few different approaches none of which i particular liked so i came up with my own. The following approach uses two hash tables to ensure that if a user is in multiple groups they only get enumerated once and also any circular group nesting are taken care of as well seems to work well for me so i thought I'd share it. In the case of this script he $groupName is the DistiguishedName of the Group you want to enumerate the members of. $repeathashGroup = @{ } $repeathashUser = @{ } function Get-member($GroupName){ $Grouppath = "LDAP://" + $GroupName $groupObj = [ADSI]$Grouppath foreach($member in $groupObj.Member){ $userPath = "LDAP://" + $member $UserObj = [ADSI]$userPath if($UserObj.groupType...

ProxyAddresses are something in Exchange environments that can be a challenge to maintain over a long period of time and also during migrations or consolidations something that you need to deal with. If your lucky then just modifying your recipient policies may work the magic that you need if not and you have a large number of users that you need to modify you need to look at creating a script or doing a lot of mouse work. The first challenge if your going to write a script to do this is because your going to be deleting information just doing a one-liner or simple script may mean you will end up removing more information than you want. So one way to tackle this is using a simple GUI script that will allow mutiple selects to at least control what and which accounts you are going to affect. The good thing about createing a simple Gui is that it can also be used to do some analysis first. So the script i've created allows you to search based on the proxy address domain you want t...

Its often useful to be able to create a link that will open a specific email within OWA for a variety of different uses (eg RSS feeds, Summary email, Calendar Summary pages etc). With EWS you can get the OWAid which is necessary to form an OWA URL that will be usable by using a covertid operation. Depending on whether you want to show items that are located in mailbox or public folder then you need to use one of two different objects when doing a covertid eg to convert Mailbox Items into the OWA format from a EWS Query $aiItem = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.AlternateId $aiItem.Mailbox = "Blah@Blah.com" $aiItem.UniqueId = $Item.Id.UniqueId $aiItem.Format = [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.IdFormat]::EwsId; $owaid = $service.ConvertId($aiItem, [Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.IdFormat]::OwaId) If its a public folder use the following $aiItem = New-Object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.AlternatePublicFolderItemId $aiItem.FolderI...

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 ...