Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

In Part 1 of this continuing series I looked at the basics of accessing a Mailbox using the new REST api in PowerShell with Exchange and in Part 2 accessing all the mailboxes in a tenant as an Administrative application using Certificate authentication. In this installment I've expanded the REST PowerShell module to encompass most of the common data operations like enumerating Folder and Items. Getting a folder from Path A common thing you might want to do with a script that accesses a Mailbox is access a non default folder eg say a folder that a user or application has created in the Inbox. To access a folder with the REST api you need to first know the Id of that particular folder. With the WellKnownFolders in a Mailbox you can use the constants such as Inbox,SentItems etc but for non default folders you need some code that will first find the Id of the Folder by searching for the folder in question in each of the parent folders. I've added a function in the Rest modul...

As there has been a bit of talk about archiving lately and the new Archive Folder vs the Online Archive in Office365  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Archive-in-Outlook-2016-for-Windows-25f75777-3cdc-4c77-9783-5929c7b47028?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US  and https://www.petri.com/exchange-online-archive-options  .I'd though I'd do a post about the Archive Item operation in EWS which was introduced in Exchange 2013 and is an interesting lever for admins to use if they want to look a manually archiving items to a Mailboxes online archive without using Archive Policies. The Archive Item operation is basically designed to allow you to move items from the Primary to the Online Archive more easily instead of having to batch a Move operation. To use this operation you need to enumerate the Items you want to archive (using a search filter or other restriction) and then provide that as one of the inputs for archive Items as longs a...

This is part 2 in my REST series in which we will look at AppOnly tokens. These are the Tokens you would look to use when you want to write an application or script that would access every mailbox in an Office365 Tenant.  For an Admin or DevOps person looking at what they might want to do with the new REST API this is useful when your looking to write something that will tweak a config setting on all Mailboxes to comply with a certain Organization policy (no matter how insane) or do some custom Item task that isn't supported in any of the Admin cmdlets. To simplify AppOnly tokens as much as I can they are an Oauth Access token that are requested using Certificate Authentication. Then depending on what Application permission scopes have been allowed for the app in Azure eg your script or app will be able to access that particular Mailbox data across all the Mailboxes within your tenant. In EWS if you understood how i...

The Outlook REST API 's https://dev.outlook.com/ which are part of Office365 and Exchange 2016 is one of the ways new feature are being delivered for Mailbox clients which previously where delivered via EWS operations. They are also part of the Graph API https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs which is Microsoft's envisioned unified data access API that has the ultimate goal of allowing you to access all your data endpoints via a single interface/endpoint. In this series of posts I'm going to be looking at writing a PowerShell module that uses the REST API to access Mailbox data and some of the new Exchange features like Groups and the focused Inbox. To keep things simple and flexible I'm not going to use any helper libraries (like the ADAL library or the Outlook Services Client) which I hope will make the script as portable and easy to use as possible with the one downside of while making the code a little more complex  I'm going to use the...

One interesting thing I learnt this week from a mailing list that I knew how it worked but didn't know the detail of was the OOF history feature. This feature has been around for ages and its what Exchange uses to ensure you don't receive more then one copy of an OOF message when you send to a mailbox where the OOF status is enabled. According to this KB https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3106609/out-of-office-oof-messages-are-sent-multiple-times-to-recipients  this list has a limit of 10000 entries and can cause problems at times like any feature so it give some details on how to manually clear it. The more interesting part for a developer is the property they mention PR_DELEGATED_BY_ RULE (or PidTagDelegatedByRule https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee218716%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx ). This property contains a list of all the Email Addresses that this Mailbox has sent an OOF message to while the OOF feature was enabled which is som...

One of the new features that has been added in Exchange 2016 and Office365 in OWA is a birthday calendar which is a dedicated calendar for the Birthday appointments that are associated with contacts. eg Like many of the special folders in a Mailbox the folder name for this is localized so if your mailbox is set to use a different language this folder name should appear in your localized language. Unlike most of the special folders in Exchange there is no WellKnownFolder enumeration for the birthday calendar so if you want to open this folder you either need to search for it by name (as long as you know the localization of the Mailbox) or you can use the following extended property that should exist on the root mailbox folder. So in EWS you can do something like the following to access the HexEntryId value from this extended property which you can then convert to a EWSId using the ConvertId operation and then you will be able to bind to the folder...

Between Exchange 2013 and 2016 there where few new operations introduced into EWS, one operation that was introduced was the SetUserPhoto operation which pairs with the GetUserPhoto operation that was introduced in Exchange 2013. What this operation does is allows you to set/upload a high resolution photo for a user to be used in Exchange and Skype for Business in Exchange Online or Exchange 2016. A little bit more about the high ressolution user photo is that when you set this it uploads this as an item in the Non_IPM_Root of the Mailbox (so it is not visible to the user) with a message class of IPM.UserPhoto if you where to look at a Mailbox with a Mapi Editor you can see the object that this creates. eg If you look at the UserPhoto Object itself you can see the different size formats are stored ready to access in a number of different Binary Mapi properties eg So what the SetUserPhoto operation does i...