From the category archives:

Exchange Shell

Connect to Office 365 Using a PowerShell Function

February 16, 2012

When you sign-up for Exchange Online (or Office 365, which includes Exchange Online), an Exchange organization is created for you in Microsoft’s datacenter. One of the really cool things about Exchange Online is that besides its easy-to-use web interface, you also have the ability to manage your cloud-based organization using PowerShell. Shell-savvy administrators can run [...]

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Auditing Distribution Group Membership Changes

November 17, 2010

Exchange 2010 includes Administrator Audit Logging functionality to log all administrator actions. Because all administrator actions, including those taken using the EMC and the new web-based ECP consoles must fire off a Shell command under the hood, admin audit logging records cmdlets that can make changes (the ones that use the New and Set verbs, [...]

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Exchange 2010: Remove a RBAC Role from a Role Group

June 1, 2010

Exchange 2010 ships with a great new security feature – Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Having worked on the RBAC architecture of another product in what seems like a previous life, I’m excited about the RBAC implementation in Exchange! I wanted to write a detailed article/post on RBAC, but given current time constraints, the longish, [...]

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Where are mailbox last logon, client IP address, and other details in Exchange 2007?

July 24, 2008

In Exchange Server 2003/2000, expanding a Mailbox Database (MDB) provides information about mailboxes in a database, last logon/logoff times and account(s) that logged on to mailboxes (see ‘Displaying Client IP Address in Exchange System Manager‘ for details). Figure 1: In Exchange 2003, the Logons node displays Store logon-related information. Click here to see a bigger [...]

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Exchange Quick Audit: mailboxes created in last 7 days

June 24, 2008

I remember writing plenty of scripts to report on different things such as user accounts created every week/month, user accounts modified, accounts disabled, etc. for SOX compliance. Some of those scripts used to be rather long, and in hindsight— involved a lot more lines of code than an administrator should have to write. Although I [...]

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How to forward mail to an external email address

February 18, 2008

In Exchange Server 2003, mail for a recipient can be forwarded to an alternate recipient by modifying the recipient’s Delivery Options in ADUC | recipient -> properties | Exchange General tab. Figure 1: Use Delivery Options to auto forward email to an alternate recipient in Exchange 2003 If you need to forward mail to an [...]

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HOW TO: List mailboxes with Full Mailbox Access permission assigned

February 5, 2008

In “HOW TO: Grant Full Mailbox Access permission“, we saw how to assign and view mailbox permissions, including Full Access. Here’s how you can get a list of mailboxes with explicitly-assigned (i.e. not inherited) Full Access permissions. You can specify a single mailbox and retrieve the permissions assigned on it by using the Get-MailboxPermission cmdlet. [...]

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Setting Message Size Limits in Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007

September 10, 2007

In Distribution Groups and maximum recipients per message, we looked at how the maximum recipients per message settings are treated differently by Exchange Server 2010/2007 and Exchange 2003/2000 when sending to Distribution Groups. Message size limits are an important mechanism to control mailbox sizes, guarantee service availability, and protect from potential DoS attacks. Another commonly [...]

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Why Get-TransportAgent doesn’t agree with the Exchange console

July 6, 2007

You disable a particular anti-spam agent — let’s say the Content Filtering Agent, using the Exchange Management Console (EMC). Figure 1: Disabling a transport “agent” in the Exchange Management Console Next, you use the Get-TransportAgent command to get the status of transport agents — and surprisingly the Content Filter Agent shows up as Enabled! Figure [...]

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View membership of a Dynamic Distribution Group

May 30, 2007

Dynamic Distribution Group is the Exchange Server 2010/2007 term for Query-Based Distribution Groups supported by Active Directory (and therefore Exchange Server 2003/2000) in Windows Server 2003. Unlike normal security and distribution groups, which have static membership (defined by manually adding users/recipients as members of the group), the membership of a Dynamic Distribution Group is determined [...]

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