Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

I've decided to start a new series on the blog called EWS Basics where I'll post some reusable scripts that are fit for easy customization by those people unfamiliar with EWS. So the basic idea is to have a group of samples where most of the underlying EWS plumbing code is done and you can just plug in whatever customized action you want to do on particular Items Enumerate all the Items in any folder in a Mailbox A common task when you want to report on the Item content in a Folder or you want to perform some type of action on Items (Delete,Move,Copy etc) is you will want to enumerate all the items in a folder. One analogy is doing a dir on directory (just don't mention the M: drive!) So what this sample does is lets you input the MailboxName (PrimarySMTP Address) and Path to the Folder in the mailbox where the Item are  you want to access and it will write back to the pipeline the Items it finds. So to put that together in a sample say you wan...

Conversations have been a hot area in the Messaging space recently with many different solutions jockeying for attention such as Yammer, Office365 Groups , Slack, HipChat, Skype for business and many other. Each solution offers a different method to communicate and thread different conversations in different ways  over different clients and communication platforms. Typically in Exchange conversations either take place in Mailboxes or Public folders while Groups are a now a newer offering. When it comes to reporting, looking at conversations can offer some interesting insights as to when conversations are happening how many people are participating and where a Group or Channel based solution might provide some form of productivity gain or usefulness. In EWS in Exchange 2010 and greator the findconversation operation allows you to query and group conversation threads in a Mailbox folder and you can then use the information returned about the co...

Tracking the bewildering array of clients and different Internet browsers that are being used to send email on Exchange can be an interesting challenge especially when your clients are in the cloud. One Mapi property that gets set on the SentItem in the senders Mailbox can help answer some of these questions where logs may not be available. The Named Mapi property clientinfo eg So if you write a script that accesses this property on messages in the SentItems folder you can build a report of the different sending methods that are being used and also different properties such as the browser version from the agent string being stored eg something like this I've put a script on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/GetMailUserAgentsv2.ps1  that can mine the data in the property correctly taking into account the ; used as a separator while also dealing with data enclosed in ( ) (it does this by just doing a characte...

When people mention Public Folders in Exchange a quote from Mark Twain often comes to mind "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", one often thinks the same when people write such things about email.  While Groups in Office 365 offer a compelling alternative, Public Folders are still things Admins need to deal with and Migrate occasionally. While the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets for reporting on Public Folders have improved a lot in Exchange 2013 you may still have the need from time to time to want to do some more in-depth analysis of what's happening in your Public Folders which is where EWS can come in very useful. The one big difference to reporting on folders in a Public Folder Tree vs doing the same thing in a Mailbox is that in a Public Folder tree you can't do a Deep Traversal. This means to report on Public Folders you need to enumerate the child folders of each parent folder with a separate EWS call. For very large Public Folder trees this ...

Search Folders are a feature of Exchange that allows you to have a static search based on a particular criteria  across one or more folders in a Mailbox. They can serve a number of different functions within a Mailbox and are often used to provide some of the backend functionality of new features. None of the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets gives you  a good view of the SearchFolders in a Mailbox so EWS can be particular useful for this. Eg I've put a cmdlet together that will enumerate all the Search Folders in a Mailbox (or Archive is you interested in that) and produce a report of the folder number of Items and Size of those items that match the Search Folder criteria. It will produce a report such as I've put a copy of this script up on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/SearchFoldersEnums.ps1 To Run the script use Get-SearchFolders -MailboxName Mailbox@domain.com to Get Searchfolder from an Archive ...

Mailbox retention tag application and management are one of the more complex administrative tasks on Exchange from 2010 and one task scripting can be a great help with. With EWS there are two ways you can deal with retrieving the Retention Tags that have been applied to a Folder or Item. In 2013 and 2016,  EWS returns the retention tags applied to a folder or Item as a Strongly typed property which makes things easier to deal with. In Exchange 2010 you need to access the underlying extended properties for Retention tags (this will also work on 2013 and 2016 because the extended properties are the same). I've posted up a script module on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/ReportTagged.ps1  that can do this using the Extended properties so it will work on Exchange 2010 and up. Report-TaggedFolders  - Creates a Report of the FolderTag applied to each of the Folders in a Mailbox (if they are tagged). To get all the availbi...

When you configure Calendar processing settings in Exchange either using the Exchange Administrator Centre via the Exchange Management Shell (Set-CalendarProcessing) many of these setting get held in a FAI (Folder Associated Item) in the Calendar Folder of the Mailbox in question. In EWS you can access these configuration objects using the UserConfiguration operation and classes. The Calendar settings are stored in the Roaming Dictionary format to store each of the different Key and Value pairs. For some of the settings like the bookin policy (In-policy meeting requests) and (Out-of-policy meeting requests) these are stored as an array of ExchangeDn's. I've put together a script cmdlet called Show-CalendarSettings that can dump out the Roaming dictionary setting for a Calendar Configuration object using EWS. And also for the BookIn and RequestIn policy it will loop through each of the ExchangeDn's in the array and try to resolve each of the entries vi...