Evan Dodds - Microsoft Exchange Server Blog

TechEd 2010 – Harold Wong Interview

evand_microsoft.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:37:00 GMT

Also while I was at TechEd 2010 a few weeks back, I met up with Harold Wong and he recorded a short (9 min) interview with me about Rich Coexistence.

Have a look: http://blogs.technet.com/b/haroldwong/archive/2010/06/18/tech-ed-2010-interview-with-evan-dodds-exchange-server.aspx

TechEd 2010 – Rich Coexistence

evand_microsoft.com — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:35:34 GMT

At TechEd 2010 in New Orleans a week or two ago, I gave a talk entitled “Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 to Achieve Rich Coexistence with Exchange Online”. One of the cool things about TechEd talks is that now they’re recording them and posting them publicly for access by anyone, so if this is a topic that interests you, you might want to have a look at: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/UNC309

What is “Rich Coexistence”? Well, it’s when you’ve configured Exchange to run on your premises and you’ve configured coexistence with the cloud… *AND* you’ve put at least one Exchange 2010 SP1 CAS/HUB server role in your on-prem environment as a “coexistence gateway”. Once you’ve got this set-up, your Exchange organization can be configured to appear to span both on-prem and the cloud in a pretty seamless way. The talk goes into more details on what you get if you set this up, but suffice to say it’s a great, high-fidelity coexistence scenario!

Using C# to get to MultiValuedProperty

evand_microsoft.com — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:24:57 GMT

Today's post is to address a question we dealt with fairly recently through a customer escalation. The customer was trying to figure out the best way to programmatically get access to the entries in a MultiValuedProperty collection returned as part of an Exchange object.

Specific example we'll use here: Read in one or more mailbox objects (using Get-Mailbox cmdlet) and then iterate across and output some properties. Since we're outputting "Name" and "EmailAddresses" properties here, one will be a singleton ("Name") and one will be a collection ("EmailAddresses").

To accomplish extracting this data, immediately the customer had driven straight into the Exchange.Management namespaces looking for Mailbox. But that's not the right approach. Vivek talks about why in this blog post, but the short version is that there's nothing to be gained by tying your code directly into Exchange (no useful public methods and limited benefit from the property strong-types) and quite a bit to be lost (you become tied to the assembly version, etc).

So, how then do you do it? Well, you use PSObject and non-Exchange types everywhere. There's a pretty good starter example in Technet: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332449.aspx

Which leads to the customer's real question -- "I can get the object, but how do I drill into the strong-type properties that are of types like MultiValuedProperty?"

Good news! MultiValuedProperty type implements ICollection, so it's actually pretty simple. When you extract the property value, just cast it as ICollection and you're golden!

Here's some sample code (based on the Technet code) with a few comments added:

    RunspaceConfiguration rsConfig = RunspaceConfiguration.Create();
    PSSnapInException snapInException = null;
    PSSnapInInfo info = rsConfig.AddPSSnapIn("Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Admin", out snapInException);
    Runspace myRunSpace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(rsConfig);
    myRunSpace.Open();
    Pipeline pipeline = myRunSpace.CreatePipeline();
    Command myCommand = new Command("Get-Mailbox");
    pipeline.Commands.Add(myCommand);
    Collection<PSObject> commandResults = pipeline.Invoke();
    // Ok, now we've got a bunch of mailboxes, cycle through them
    foreach (PSObject mailbox in commandResults)
    {
        //define which properties to get
        foreach (String propName in new string[] { "Name", "EmailAddresses" })
        {
            //grab the specified property of this mailbox
            Object objValue = mailbox.Properties[propName].Value;
            // is it a collection? "Name" isn't, but "EmailAddresses" is in this example
            if (objValue is ICollection)
            {
                ICollection collection = (ICollection)objValue;
                // Loop through each entry in the collection and output it
                foreach (object value in collection)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(value.ToString());
                }
            }
            else
            {
                Console.WriteLine(objValue.ToString());
            }
        }
    }
    myRunSpace.Close();

Thanks to Mike Hamler for assistance with the generic solution!

Generating LDP Dumps from PowerShell

evand_microsoft.com — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:21:55 GMT

Back in my PSS days, it was a common data-gathering/troubleshooting technique to collect "LDP Dumps" (ie - full AD propertyname+value data for a given object) as a way of collecting data for a troubleshooting investigation. If you're a really long-time Exchange administrator, just pretend I said "raw mode dump" and know that it's effectively the same thing, but for an AD object.

Recently, a customer suggested that we (Exchange) should produce a built-in cmdlet which can, given a pipeline input of an Exchange object, connect to the AD and provide this sort of LDP dump data, so that they could replace their use of LDP.exe. The rationale is that this could be pretty useful to collect this data more rapidly (and with fewer clicks) when troubleshooting an issue. I thought about it for a bit, and realized that because of the directory support built into PowerShell (or, rather, .Net) this would be something possible to write with a fairly simple script... no new cmdlet required!

Note that in an effort to keep the output looking roughly like the LDP output, I'm writing out strings rather than objects. This is a little counter to the spirit of PowerShell, of course, but it's also easily overcome with some minor changes to the script below.

Behold, the outcome of this experiment - I hope it's useful to you!

#
# LDPDump.ps1 script
# This script is a PowerShell way to simulate the effects of the old-school "LDP Dump" used by Exchange PSS and other Exchange power-administrators
# (ie - connecting with LDP.exe, navigating to an object, and double-clicking to get all of the property and value data onto the screen)
#
#
# Discover whether the script is receiving piped input
#
if ( $input.movenext() )
{
    $inputExists = $true
    $input.reset()
}
#
# There is no piped input - provide some guidance and exit
#
if (!$inputExists )
{
    write-error "You need to pipe in some object!"
    exit
}
# Let's loop on each of the things piped into the script
foreach ($j in $input)
{
    # Grab out the distinguished name (this is a little bit Exchange-centric, but it's also sort of standard-ish)
    $dn=$j.DistinguishedName
    # Did we find a DistinguishedName property? If not, ABORT!
    if($dn -eq $null)
    {
        write-error "THIS OBJECT DOES NOT HAVE A DN: $($j.ToString())"
        write-host ""
    }
    else
    {
        # OK, we found a DN... let's open a session to AD
        $ldapdn = "[ADSI]'LDAP://$dn'"
        $ldpdump = invoke-expression "$ldapdn"
        # Print a header for this object
        write-host "$($ldpdump.psbase.path)"
    foreach ($k in $ldpdump.psbase.properties.PropertyNames)
        {
            # Make each count, propertyname and value output look pretty much like LDP does (ie - "#>Name:Value")
            write-host "$($ldpdump.psbase.properties[$k].count)>$($k):$($ldpdump.psbase.properties[$k])"
        }
        write-host ""
    }
}

Thanks to Sebastian Bengochea for help getting at the ProxyCollection data!

Interact 2008 - April 8-10, 2008

evand_microsoft.com — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:47:01 GMT

I just heard that (Exchange VP) Terry's going to be giving the keynote at Interact this year, and he's promised the first real public details about ExchangeLabs! Sweet... this is exciting stuff!

Plus -- Robert and Andrew will be presenting the PowerShell Automation talk, so that alone makes the conference worthwhile, of course. :)

Nested DL Membership in Exchange 2007

evand_microsoft.com — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:34:01 GMT

Aeons ago, Vivek posted about how to get DL membership in Exchange 2007. He commented that "This can be adapted to do nested membership as well—I’ll leave it to you to figure out how."

At the time, I remember reading this and thinking briefly about how I'd do this, but never really sitting down and doing it to prove my idea was correct.

Well, my time finally ran out on not looking at this. The other day, someone sent me a semi-working PowerShell function to get DL membership (including recursion) and asked me how to make it detect looping recursion. It's been over a year since Vivek delegated this problem "to you", so I guess that's about enough time and we should share an answer. Let's get to it!

Here's the function we started with:

function Get-DLMemberRecurse
{
                foreach ($varTemp in get-distributiongroupmember $args[0])
                {
                                $varTemp
                                if ($varTemp.RecipientType -like "Mail*Group") { Get-DLMemberRecurse $varTemp.Identity }
                }
}

Key problem? If you have DG1 which has DG2 as a member which then has DG1 as a member (a looping membership hierarchy which is totally possible to set, but totally useless practically), it loops forever until it overflows the stack. Whoops, that's no good!

So we need to make a couple of changes to solve this problem. We need to do at least two things (which I've color coded in my updated function below to highlight the changes):

Add some recursion protection, using PowerShell’s understanding of scope and recursion. This is useful to ensure we can effectively reset and subsequently build a list of DGs we’ve already traversed.
Build a list of DGs we’ve traversed, and update it each time we find a new one

function Get-DLMemberRecurse
{
      $ParentScriptBlock = (get-variable -scope 1 MyInvocation -value).MyCommand.ScriptBlock;
      if($ParentScriptBlock -ne $MyInvocation.MyCommand.ScriptBlock)
      {
            # we're not recursing (we should only hit this once and we'll use it to reset the DGList)
            $global:DGList = @()
            $global:DGList += (Get-DistributionGroup $args[0]).Identity
    }
      foreach ($varTemp in get-distributiongroupmember $args[0])
      {
            $varTemp
            if ($varTemp.RecipientType -like "Mail*Group" -and -not ($global:DGList -contains $varTemp.identity) ) { $global:DGList += $varTemp.Identity; Get-DLMemberRecurse $varTemp.Identity }
      }
}

Special thanks to my buds on the PowerShell team for getting me going with the "how to know if I'm inside a recursion loop using MyInvocation variable" tip.

Using PowerShell + WMI to manage legacy Exchange

evand_microsoft.com — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:44:00 GMT

Dmitry blogs all about it here. I'd been meaning to write pretty much this very same post ever since I attended Devin's talk on managing Legacy Exchange with PowerShell at ExchangeConnections ~~last November~~ this past April, so I'm glad to see Dmitry write it up!

Evan's TechEd session video is posted

evand_microsoft.com — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 20:49:00 GMT

It turns out that my TechEd Exchange Scripting with PowerShell session was recorded to video, and now it's available for all to download (no more having to provide TechEd credentials!). Link below on the session title to the video of my session and to the rest of the sessions they've just released!

Microsoft Windows PowerShell Scripting for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Evan Dodds, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Level: 300

This session covers the new Windows PowerShell-based Exchange cmdline and scripting interface. Learn how to convert your multiple page Visual Basic and COM scripts to mere one-liners in Exchange 2007. We cover the basics of the management shell, as well as the underlying design and key concepts. Additionally, we go into more depth on how to build larger scripts that can be used to automate small, medium, as well as enterprise business scenarios.

Link to list of all Tech Ed 2007 Recorded Sessions for ITs Showtime:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/itsshowtime/result_search.aspx?event=65&x=10&y=3

DynamicDistributionGroup for all users in a particular storage group

evand_microsoft.com — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 01:45:00 GMT

Lots of people are asking lots of questions at the ExchangeNinjas wiki! Glad to see so much participation both from within the Exchange team and also from the broad Exchange community!!

This question struck me as pretty interesting, so I figured I'd surface it on the blog as well as answering it (a few weeks ago) on the wiki... From the wiki's Recipient Management FAQs page (originally was posted to the Ask a Question page) :

Q: I want to create a custom dynamic distribution group for all users in a storage group. I can get the user if I use: get-mailbox | where {$_.Database -like "*<SGName>*"}
BUT this doesn't work for a new DDG :
new-DynamicDistributionGroup -alias test1a -name test1a -recipientfilter {Database -like "*SG01-SUKMSDMBX03*"} -org exchorg.local
I get no members! It will work on a per server basis, but this it no good for me. Can you help? Is this possible?

A: The problem is that the "Database" filter can't do partial string matches, because underneath this property is actually a distinguished name value in the AD (which can't do substring matching). Building an infrastructure that allows you to direct email to mailboxes on a storage group is definitely possible -- just not like this. Instead, you need to ensure you're using the full distinguished name for each database you want to compare against, and not using wildcards (ie, asterisk *)

There's an easy way to do this and a hard way. The hard way I'll just talk about, then I'll show you the easy way. The hard way would be to iterate through all of the MDBs in your selected storage group, concatenating a filter-parser string made up of their DNs... with appropriately placed "-or" operators between. Then pass this string into the New-DDG cmdlet as the RecipientFilter. Yuck.

The easy way is to create a DDG for each mailboxdatabase. Then create a DistributionGroup (doesn't have to be DDG) and add all of these per-MDB DDGs into the DG. Here's how that might look:

new-distributiongroup DG-MySg1 -Type Distribution -SamAccountName DG-MySg1
get-mailboxdatabase -Server Srv1 -StorageGroup MySG1 | % { New-DynamicDistributionGroup "DDG-$($_.Name)" -RecipientFilter "Database -eq '$($_.Identity.DistinguishedName)'" } | % { Add-DistributionGroupMember DG-MySg1 -Member $_.Identity }

Updated July10: Added -Server switch to make it a more real-world syntax.

Evan's TechEd 2007 Wrapup

evand_microsoft.com — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:20:49 GMT

I realized this week that all of the sessions (and video recordings of each session -- I didn't even realize they were recording ALL of the sessions!) are available online. This means even if you ended up double-booked for two interesting sessions and had to choose just ONE in person, you can still review the deck and the video for the session you missed. Of course, that means you probably don't need to see my sessions, since you SURELY chose to see those in person and missed the OTHER, conflicting session. Right? :)

Anyway, here are the links to sessions I participated in this year. I think you may have to be signed in to the TechEd site to get through to these (and note that if you're signed in, you can get to these directly by selecting "Content Downloads & Recordings" in the left of the screen).

UNC200 - Exchange 2007 Overview (Video). I did a short Exchange+PowerShell demo toward the end of Terry's overview talk.
UNC212R - Managing Exchange 2007 (PPT and Video). I covered the Friday morning repeat of the GUI+PowerShell talk.
UNC309 - Exchange 2007 Automation (PPT and Video). This is the Exchange+PowerShell session. There was also a 75min Q&A "Interactive Theatre" afterward, which was not recorded.

Also, I think the PowerShell session is going to be on the ITSShowtime site at some point in the near future as well. I'll post the link when it is up.