Essential Exchange

I do bit shifting in PowerShell all the time. It's quite necessary when you are working with option values in Active Directory, WMI, and various Win32 interfaces. .NET tends to use enumerations, which are tad easier to deal with in PowerShell. I had never felt it necessary to break my routines out...

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 September of 2005, I wrote a blog post named " Sending an e-mail to users whose password is about to expire ". Written in VBScript, it was one of my most popular blog posts of all time. I still have clients of mine that use it and I get occaisional email questions regarding it. However,...

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...

Long ago and far away (way back in 2006) I wrote an article for finding the disk space used by Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, Finding disk space used by Exchange . While this worked through a few Exchange 2007 betas, by Exchange 2007 RTM, the STM file had been removed, and the original script would...