en Passant

We are set to finish our migration of several email domains over to our Exchange 2007 environment. One of the last issues to migrate across is the Exchange 2003 Recipient Update Policies, into the Exchange 2007 Email Address Policies.

Our current e2k3 RUP is a fine-tuned LDAP query:

(mailnickname=*)
(|(extensionattribute3=EXAMPLE*)(department=EXAMPLE*))
(|(objectCategory=group)(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)))

We have been working to synchronize our GAL through non-technical means with another remote company. We don't actively have a connection to this other environment so sneaker-net is the solution.

I currently get a CSV from this company with the following columns.

• Mode (A for Add, D for Delete, C for Change)
• FirstName
• LastName
• DisplayName
• EmailAddress

I was reading through Zanderfin's blog about the World of Warcraft backgrounds posted to their site.

At any rate, it may actually motivate me enough to monthly change my wallpaper. Now, if I can just figure out a way to automate that.

Asked for a query to get a summary of the Outlook Clients that are connecting to our Exchange server. The following Code will run against all mailboxes in a specific OU, but removing the filter will get all mailboxes on an Exchange server.

Your final results will include a count of the client versions in your environment. As you can see, each of our CIO dept has a Blackberry device (hence 2 MAPI Outlook client versions) and is running Outlook 2003 SP3 (Google 11.0.8161).

For example:
Count Name
----- ----

I've always believed the best way to learn scripting is to build a script that you immediately have a need want for. For example, I was reading through one of my Warlock forums for World of Warcraft on a flowchart describing gem selection for gear. OMG, That's great, but well, I want to change it, I want to automate it.

Recently one of our executives received an odd email message. Initial review of the message shown that her name was in the FROM field, an external recipient was in the TO field, the subject was something like "Request Update: Original Meeting Subject" and to top it off, it shown up as unread in her Inbox.

Initial analysis suggested that the message was a spam or spoofed message, but the subject was deceiving. OK, if that were so, then someone has been infected with a virus or spam-bot. Not good. This required further investigation.

In Exchange 2007, they have finally done resources correct. Using Powershell, you can define a mailbox specifically as a conference room, laptop, projector or other resource. As a resource it will appear differently in Outlook 2007 and OWA. These resources can be defined to automagically accept meeting requests using specific permissions on these resources. No longer will you need to use the flaky AAA as in Exchange 2003.

The attached script is my very detailed, all-in-one convert a standard/migrated mailbox to a conference room resource in Exchange 2007.

Since bringing my site back up, I have been playing with various themes. The last theme I was using unfortunately had a dark background and white font. This caused my code samples to not be visible unless you highlighted the content. Awkward.

That's why today I bring you Addari. Hopefully this works better for you and me.

With this change, I also installed a spam filter on my comments. I have been moderating all my comments since originally started, but hoping this spam filter will fix that and I can get back to just blogging.

Here's the problem. To simplify a complex script, I have built a small menu.

1. Quit
2. User1
3. User2
4. ...

The list of users is dynamic (up to a maximum) defined as $counter. This dynamic list is composed of names from previous runs of the script (via being dotsourced). In addition to these users, I let the client type in names not defined in the subset, sort of a "Other" field.

Why?? Why oh Why? Here's what I found..

My employer has provided to my team free powershell training to anyone who wanted it. Though I have been doing powershell scripts for over a year now, there were a few elements I had not learned through my self study.

1) When typing in properties to a cmdlet, you only need to type enough of the property to distinguish it from other properties.

get-mailbox -identity eric.woodford -organizationalunit "MyUsers OU"

Can be shortened to:

mailbox eric.woodford -org "MyUsers OU"

Where:

• Mailbox is an alias for "get-mailbox"