Exchange Server 2007: Bulk mailbox-enabling users using Exchange Shell

I’d written about how to bulk create mailboxes (including user accounts) from a CSV file [read previous post: Exchange Server 2007: Bulk creation of mailboxes using Exchange Management Shell]. This is in response to the reader who posted a comment asking for a way to mailbox-enable existing user accounts.

Bulk mailbox-enabling users using the Exchange console

In Exchange Server 2007 SP1, the Exchange console (EMC) allows you to create mailboxes for existing users. When selecting an existing user in the New Mailbox wizard, you can select multiple users by using the regular SHIFT-Click (to select a continuous list of users) and CTRL-click (to pick the users you want).

First we need to find the users without mailboxes. The get-user command will list all users. The RecipientType property of the user is either User or UserMailbox. As the name clearly suggests, those with UserMailbox as RecipientType are already mailbox-enabled – leaving those with RecipientType User.

You can enable all users with RecipientType User:

get-user | where-object{$_.RecipientType –eq “User”}

Yes, that may not be a great idea! So let’s filter these users. If these users reside in a particular Organizational Unit, we can restrict our search to that OU. In this case, we’ll look for users in the OU called “People”:

get-user –organizationalUnit people | where-object{$_.RecipientType –eq “User”}

Now we get a list of all users (who are not mailbox-enabled) from that OU. We can further restrict this list to all users who are members of a particular department. Since Sales is our favorite department, let’s pick Sales:

get-user –organizationalUnit people | where-object{$_.RecipientType –eq “User” -and $_.department –eq “Sales”}

Now we’ve got a smaller list of folks – those residing in the People OU belonging to Sales dept. and aren’t mailbox-enabled yet. Let’s go ahead and mailbox-enable these users:

get-user –organizationalUnit people | where-object {$_.RecipientType –eq “User” -and $_.department –eq “Sales”} | Enable-Mailbox –Database “EXCHANGE1\Mailbox Database” | get-mailbox | select name,windowsemailaddress,database

The above command mailbox-enables these users and outputs a list of their names, default email address, and the mailbox Store on which their mailbox(es) reside.

Similarly, you can also use other user attributes of user accounts like city, state, country, etc. to selectively mailbox-enable users.

The WOW! factor and what really makes it a fun process is the fact that once you get a hang of the syntax and know what you're looking for, the entire process happens really quickly.

PowerShell / Exchange shell does to VBS scripts what scripting did to repetitive GUI tasks.