Managing Outlook Anywhere Per User

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When Exchange 2003 came out, it offered Outlook Anywhere, although it was called “RPC/HTTPS”. This was an all or nothing service. In other words, if you set up Outlook Anywhere on the server then every user was able to use it. This poses a data security risk because users could connect to their mailbox from any Outlook client and download a copy of their mailbox, without using VPN or any other security checks on the remote system.

In Exchange 2007 (after SP1) and 2010, Outlook Anywhere permissions and capabilities are more granular.  You can set up Outlook Anywhere within the environment and then limit the ability on a per user basis. 

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Exchange 2010 Dynamic Distribution Group not working

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There is a bug in the creation process for Dynamic Distribution Groups (DDG) in Exchange 2010.  When you use the Exchange Management Shell to create a DDG and specify the Organizational Unit (OU) where the DDG should reside in Active Directory, you must also specify the –RecipientContainer to search for that DDG.  Otherwise the DDG Recipient Container defaults to the OU where the DDG was created.

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Reporting on Number of Users per Pool

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One of my customers has Lync deployment with multiple sites and three Lync pools. If I try to use the Lync Control Panel to determine the number of users per site I am limited to 200 results. This obvious is not sufficient if you have more than 200 users in a site. Never mind that I think it’s shortsighted not to be able to modify the number of results in Control Panel, but never the less, PowerShell to the rescue!!! I took an old Exchange script and modified it to pull all users and group them by RegistrarPool and then sorted them by Name. Here is the little cmdlet.

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E2K7: How to Change the Recipient Scope

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When managing Exchange 2007, the recipient scope for Exchange Management Shell (EMS) and Exchange Management Console (EMC) defaults to the domain where the Exchange servers are located. Recipient scope refers to the specified portion of the Active Directory directory service hierarchy that the Exchange Management Console and the Exchange Management Shell uses for recipient management. When you set the recipient scope to a specific location within Active Directory, you can view and manage all recipients stored in that location and all of the containers under it. If your environment has multiple domains, then you may need to change the scope of recipients to find specific accounts. Read More →

E2K7: Determining Status of Database Backups

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While running some reports on Exchange backup success I could not figure out why when I ran get-mailboxdatabase | fl Name,LastFullBackup it would return a blank LastFull Backup.  In Exchange Management console I could look at the properties of the database and see the Last full backup and the Last incrementation backup times.

 

After some search, Martin’s Wonderful World of Exchange had an answer for me.  You need to add -status to your command or the backup properties where blank.
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Generating HTML Web Reports through Exchange Management Shell

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As you know Exchange Management Shell is an extension of Windows PowerShell (PS). Today I found a really useful PS command to generate HTML reports that include data generated through Exchange Management Shell commands. In an effort to create a “Dashboard” for our Exchange environment, I’ve been trying to find a way to gather information in Exchange Shell and publish that data into an HTML report. The ConvertTo-HTML command will do exactly that.

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Reporting on Mailbox Databases

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There are a number of advantages to spreading your users’ mailboxes across your databases in Exchange 2007 versus putting department or groups in to a single database together. One of the biggest advantages is risk mitigation of a single database outage putting an entire group out of commission. Managing database sizes is also important in your environment to meet backup and restore Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in your organization.

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