Essential Exchange

I'm working with a new client and this client is a "wholly owned subsidiary" of another company and is getting ready to be spun off as their own company. One of the things we are doing is configuring their network to be standalone and not part of the corporate Active Directory. That involves...

Jeffrey Snover of Microsoft, PowerShell dude extraordinaire, recently reminded us of a way to Speed Up PowerShell Startup times, based on an article of over a year ago titled Update-Gac.ps1 . And yes, this does help to speed up the Exchange Management Shell and the OpsMgr Command Shell too. Taking that...

I'm in the process of tech-reviewing an important book (you'll want it on your shelf once it is released), and one of the things I did today was spend a while figuring out how to do Attribute Scoped Queries in PowerShell. If you develop in C# or C++, or use adfind to do your searches, those tools...

One of the mailing lists I read and occaisionally post on is named ActiveDir. A lot of heavy-hitters in the AD world hang-out around there. I've learned quite a bit by lurking there. A recent poster had wanted to create a few thousand accounts for testing purposes, and have them all follow a certain...

In March of 2006, I authored this blog post, Finding Services Using non-System Accounts , with the script being written in VBscript. Two years later, most of my environment is now in PowerShell. So, I've decided to update that post with the PowerShell equivalent. The VBscript version of the utility...

I first got really interested in Exchange Server when I started working on hosting the product for multiple companies (while using only a single server environment). In fact, I started this blog to talk mainly about hosted Exchange. My interests have expanded and I enjoy working with all of Exchange...

A number of parameters for EMS (the Exchange Management Shell - which is just PowerShell v1 plus the Exchange snap-ins) require the specification of a multivalued property. A multivalued property is just what it sounds like - a property that has multiple values. A very common one is the RemoteIPRanges...

Some things are just very easy in PowerShell. It's great! Here is a true quickie - rename and reboot a computer system (including a remote computer!): function renameAndReboot([string]$computer, [string]$newname) { $comp = gwmi win32_computersystem -computer $computer $os = gwmi win32_operatingsystem...

In Part 1 of this mini-series I presented the beginnings of a database layer supporting three different database architectures, that could easily be extended to handle more database engines. In Part 2 we built on Part 1 and discussed variable handling techniques. In this article, Part 3, we'll build...

In yesterday's post http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2008/01/22/DML-with-PS-_2D00_-Part-1.aspx, I promised that we would talk more about DML with PowerShell. In writing resilient code, the database layer has to be prepared to deal with NULL, invalid variables, missing variables...