Essential Exchange

Most companies have a set of primary Internet domains (Exchange accepted domains) that they use to assign to users. However, a constant is that most companies also assign a secondary email address that has a domain which is identical for all of their users. That is true in my environment, and in that...

This is an update of my post Determining the Exchange Version - without using Get-ExchangeServer, from April 25, 2012. Since then, Exchange 2013 has been released! I've had several requests from people who are not PowerShell scripters to update that function. So here it is. I have repeated the text...

Every major Exchange release comes with updates to the Active Directory schema. In this case, "major release" means new major version (at RTM), every service pack, and (probably) every Cumulative Update with the new servicing model introduced for Exchange 2013. Each update is unique to that...

I'm working with a client that has - over an extended period of time - accumulated thousands of security groups, most of which are mail enabled for use by both Exchange and for setting rights on various objects. Becasue they use embedded groups (that is, placing a group as a member of another group...

In my last blog post, Determining the Exchange Version Without Using Get-ExchangeServer ,I showed how to read the Exchange version from the registry. Shortly after posting that, the questions began to roll in about "how to make my PowerShell session behave like the Exchange Management Shell"...

If you write lots of Exchange scripts (as I do), and have several different versions of Exchange on which you need to run those scripts (as I do); you soon see the need for being able to determine what version of Exchange a particular server is running - and you may need to do this outside of the Exchange...

One of the traditional issues associated with cleaning up an Active Directory Directory Services (AD DS) domain in DNS is to ensure that duplicate names in DNS are removed (this is typically an issue caused by not having DNS Scavenging enabled, or by having hosts forcefully removed from the domain and...

I've been working with a company that is in the process of setting up a remote datacenter for disaster recovery. They brought me in to help design their Exchange cross-site resilience, and I've been helping them with a few other things too. Primary connectivity between the primary datacenter...

Regardless of whether a server is for Exchange, for SQL, or for any other use; a key component of the server's configuration is the set of IP addresses assigned to it. Many organizations apply all addresses (even server addresses) using DHCP. For servers, this is often based on reservations of the...

In August of 2010, I posted Generating a report on Distribution Groups and their Membership . For most people, that script worked just fine. However, it had some issues: Large groups would cause PowerShell to generate an error about concurrent pipelines The script generated string output instead of object...