Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Preface Searching Mailboxes is something I've written a fair bit about in the past but in this article I'm going to cover how searching has been surfaced in the new REST API on Office365 and Exchange 2016.  The first place to go when considering searching in Office365 is the Security and Compliance center  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/run-a-content-search-in-the-office-365-security-compliance-center-61852fd9-fe8a-4880-a339-cb19ed3bff4a  it offers the most feature rich and realistic search experience that is difficult to replicate with client facing Mailbox API's (eg things like RBAC's delegated access rights, litigation holds etc). Given the amount of data that can be stored in Mailboxes now its important to have a realistic expectation of the time it will take and difficulty of searching 100,000's items in multiple folders or millions of items in an Archive is important (at the time of writing Archives aren't accessible using the REST API). S...

Quite recently the Reporting side of the Graph API has moved in GA from beta, there are quite a number of reports that can be run across various Office365 surfaces but in this post I'm going to focus on the Mailbox related ones. Accessing Office365 Reports using Powershell is nothing new and has been available in the previous reporting endpoint  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj984326.aspx however from the end of January many of these cmdlets are now being depreciated in favour of the Graph API  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn387059.aspx . Prerequisites  In comparison to using the Remote PowerShell cmdlets where only the correct Office365 Admin permissions where needed, to use the new Graph API reports endpoint you need to use OAuth for authentication so this requires an Application Registration  https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/concepts/auth_overview  that is then given the correct oAuth Grants to use...

For about a year I've being working on a PowerShell Module for accessing the new REST API for Office365 (the Graph API) and Exchange 2016. I've been experimenting and listening to the various feedback I've been getting and finally have an update to share that addresses a lot of the useability issues (okay it was just too developer orientated). Application registrations Still probably the biggest stumbling block is not having an application registration, I now have a menu that allows to you use various default registrations for testing and also to save a default registration that you create. This means once you have your own registration setup you can save the ClientId so it will be used as the default when you next use the module. Aliasing A failure in proper planning when I initially created the module meant I didn't use a specific alias for the cmdlets in the module which meant it can cause a lot of conflicts if you have other modules loaded. With the ne...

One of the scripts that I posted that seems to have a steady stream of input is the EWSContacts Module I put up some time ago. Thanks to  Friedrich Weinmann  who did some recent cleanup of the module on GitHub it is now looking a lot neater. After a recent question from somebody I've made some more changes to the  Export-EXCContactFolder function to allow you to if your exporting a Public Folder or a mailbox's Contacts Folder to recurse any subfolders of that folder you passed in and export those contacts also. When this option is selected a field is added to the CSV to tell you which MailboxFolder (or PublicFolder) the contact was exported from. To use this new feature when exporting contacts from a Public folder just use the recurse switch eg Export-EXCContactFolder -PublicFolderPath "\Office Contacts" -Recurse -MailboxName gscales@datarumble.com -FileName c:\temp\alc2.csv Another parameter I've added is the -RecurseMailbox which will instead of startin...

Pinning email is a new feature that is available in OWA(or Outlook on the Web) on Office365 and Exchange 2016 and a much requested feature in Outlook  https://outlook.uservoice.com/forums/322590-outlook-2016-for-windows/suggestions/12963459-pin-or-stick-important-emails-at-the-top-of-your-I What happens when you pin an Email in OWA is it sets two MAPI properties on the backend when pinned the value will look like the following the value 1/9/4500 is significant and is used when an Item in Pinned in the UI, When the Item is Unpinned in the UI 0x0F01 reverts back the current time and  0x0F02 is removed from the item. So in EWS if you want to display all the Pinned email you can use a SearchFilter to filter the Item based on the value of this property eg  $PR_RenewTime2 = new-object Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.ExtendedPropertyDefinition(0xF02,[Microsoft.Exchange.WebServices.Data.MapiPropertyType]::SystemTime);  $SfSearchFilter = new-object Microsoft...

As I've been adding new cmdlets to my Exch-REST PowerShell module I've been knocking up against some of the limitations and frustrations of working within a console environment. One of them is if say I find some Messages within a Mailbox which needs further investigation for whatever reason, It good to have an easy way of opening up that message to take a look at the content that isn't normally easy to view in the cmdline like the html body of a message and maybe I want to download any attachments or MessageHeaders without needing to open Outlook or OWA. A number of years ago I created a simple EWS mail client that just acted as a simple Email client using EWS so I decided to port this to the REST API and include it in the Exch-Rest Module. I also broke out two of the winforms from this simple client to enable just reading a particular Message you may have found using any of the other cmldets as well as a simple Form to Send a New Message with or without an Attachment. ...

As I had a few questions about exporting contacts to CSV from both Mailbox and Public folders I've added some new functions to the my EWS contacts module to make this easier.  I've added to new cmdlets the first is Export-ContactsFolderToCSV This will export a contacts folder to CSV's either the default Contacts Folder in a Mailbox or a secondary Contacts folder if you enter in the FolderPath eg to export the Default contacts Folder use Export-ContactsFolderToCSV - MailboxName user@domain.com -FileName c:\exports\contacts.csv To export a Secondary Contacts Folder use Export-ContactsFolderToCSV - MailboxName user@domain.com -FileName c:\exports\contacts.csv -Folder \Contacts\SecondContactsFolder Export-PublicFolderContactsFolderToCSV This will export a Public Contacts Folder to a CSV file to use this use Export-PublicFolderContactsFolderToCSV -MailboxName mailbox@domain.com -FileName c:\exports\PublicFolderexport.csv -PublicFolderPath \folder\folder2\contact...