Written by Divya Gunasekaran, Microsoft Online Services PM

Updates to two existing PowerShell cmdlets are now available to use with Microsoft Online Services.  The updates to Get-MSOnlineUser and Set-MSOnlineUserPassword give admins more visibility into password and alternate recipient settings, and more control over password expiration.

1. Get-MSOnlineUser: This cmdlet can be used to retrieve the properties of a specified user in Microsoft Online Services.  Three properties have been added to the output of this cmdlet:

• PasswordLastSetDate: Returns the date that a user last set their password.  If a user is set to change their password on next logon, the default date of “1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM” will be returned.
• ForwardingAddress: Displays the forwarding address (a.k.a. alternate recipient) that has been set for a user’s mailbox.  If no forwarding address has been set, an empty string array will be returned.
• DeliverToMailboxAndForward: Returns a Boolean indicating where messages are being delivered when a forwarding address has been set.
• If a forwarding address has been set and messages are being delivered only to the forwarding address, this property will return False.
• If a forwarding address has been set and messages are being delivered to both the user’s mailbox and the forwarding address, this property will return True.

2. Set-MSOnlineUserPassword: The Set-MSOnlineUserPassword cmdlet has been updated to make the “Password” parameter optional.  This ability allows admins to force users to change their passwords after logging in with their current credentials, rather than having to first assign new passwords to the users.  Admins can also continue to use the cmdlet as they did before to set a user’s password to a specified value and optionally require them to change their password on next logon.  Please note that requiring a user to change their password on next logon will reset the “PasswordNeverExpire” setting to False for that user.

To use the updated cmdlets, admins must download the latest 32-bit or 64-bit version of the Microsoft Online Services Migration Tools.