Active Directory

Exchange 2010: Change security groups to distribution groups

Distribution groups are a well-known concept for Exchange admins. Quite simply, a distribution group is an Active Directory group that’s Exchange-enabled and therefore has an email address. Messages sent to the group are delivered to group members, which can be mailbox users, mail users (users with an email address outside the Exchange org), mail contacts, […]

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Auditing Distribution Group Membership Changes

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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Export and Import Content Filter Words or Phrases

In Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007, you can add custom words or phrases as good or bad words to modify the Spam Confidence Level (SCL) assigned to messages. Messages with a good word or phrase are assigned an SCL of 0 and bypass other antispam agents that fire after the Content Filtering agent. Messages with […]

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Exchange Quick Audit: mailboxes created in last 7 days

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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Modifying Display Templates and additional attributes

Recently got a question about customizing the GAL and my previous post that talks about it: “HOW TO: Modify Display Template to make default email address appear in Address Book/GAL“. In Exchange 2010/2007, the new Details Template Editor can be found in EMC | Tools. The editor makes it much easier to modify templates and […]

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Exchange Server and UPN Suffixes for an OU

What’s a UPN? Back from the Windows NT days and NetBIOS-style NT domain names, we’ve been used to logging in using the DOMAIN\Username format. With the shift to Active Directory in Windows 2000 Server, we have the ability to use a User Principal Name, which is a login that looks like (and can be generally […]

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List mailboxes with Full Mailbox Access permission assigned

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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HOW TO: Hide Distribution Group membership

Exchange Server 2003’s extensions for Active Directory Users & Computers console made hiding a Distribution Group’s membership a trivial task, accomplished by right-clicking a group, selecting Exchange Tasks and selecting Hide Membership. Figure 1: The Exchange Tasks wizard in ADUC provides an option to hide Distribution Group membership in Exchange Server 2003 As the task […]

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HOW TO: Grant Full Mailbox Access permission

Follow-up to previous post “HOW TO: Assign SendAs right using Exchange shell” – the ability to assign SendAs and ReceiveAs permissions is preserved in Active Directory Users & Computers (ADUC), but the ability to grant Full Mailbox Access permission isn’t available. Full Mailbox Access is a mailbox permission (without getting into a debate about what’s […]

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View membership of a Dynamic Distribution Group

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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