As you can imagine, I was intrigued and asked to have a look, I cant tell you how much it pleases me that people are able to take the scripts I write and amend/improve them to suite there needs.

Jean has done a great job with this, I ran it against our test exchange cluster and it worked great, the end results are in the same nice format (which I have now improved to work with all browsers but that’s for another post)

On checking Jeans site I found a number of other cool powershell scripts including a nice script which allows you to analyze and defrag multiple machines hard disks from powershell, check the site out here: ‘Powershell Needfull Things’

Fantastic job Jean !

Exchange Audit is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Should I virtualise Exchange ? is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Get-MailboxDatabase -Server set-mailboxdatabase -IssueWarningQuota 80MB -ProhibitSendQuota 100MB -Prohibit SendReceiveQuota unlimited -DeletedItemRetention 35.00:00:00 -MailboxRetention 35.00:00:00 -RetainDeletedItemsUntilBackup:$true

Testing a server

These built in commands test the functionality of Exchange 2007, SCOM uses these for part of the manegement pack i think!

test-systemhealth
is a wrapper for ExBPA through the command shell, a good first point for call for testing

test-mapiconnectivity
tests MAPI access to all mailbox databases on the server

test-owaconnectivity
tests OWA access to a Client Acces Server, either run on a CAS server or specify in the syntax, you may also need to run new-testcasconnectivityuser.ps1 script to create the test account i.e
get-mailboxserver new-testcasconnectivityuser.ps1

test-mailflow
tests mailflow to and from a system mailbox on the server specified

test-servicehealth
A fast way to check the status of Exchange related services

Public Folder replication
There are a number of “builtin” scripts with Exchange 2007 that live in the \scripts folder in the exchange root
some useful ones

AddReplicaToPFRecursive.ps1
adds a server to a list of public folders and to its subfolders, I had some problems with this one, initially getting to to add a whole IPM_SUBTREE seemed a bit impossible. The script requires a top level folder parameter, but wouldn’t accept the root. which is a pain in organisations where they create all folders under the root. You can add folders explicitly, but this is painful if there are a lot!
if you specify “\” as the top level folder it appears to work…
Its a way of saving some effort, but I did find folders where replicas hadn’t been added and no errors reported so I added them manually…

get-publicfolderstatistics
get the list of public folders replicated to the server and theirs stats, useful to see if the list is approximately what it should be!

Powershell-Tastic! is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex

Public Folders and E14 – The Next Version of Exchange
Just like a certain segment of the blogosphere is concerned about Windows versions and gets excited every time a notice about “Windows 7″ (the succeeding product to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008) comes out of Redmond, I follow, instead the segment that gets excited about E14 – the next release of Exchange Server.
At this point, I would say that we probably know less about E14 than we do about Windows 7!
One of the MAJOR issues that came out of E12 (Exchange Server 2007) was that Microsoft chose to de-emphasize Public Folders. What this means is that they said they would support public folders for E12, but would not guarantee that they would be supported in releases after E12, nor would additional feature content be added to Public Folders.
Microsoft’s stated direction for public folders is the SharePoint product suite. Which, while it does a GREAT job at some things (document libraries come to mind) does poorly at other things (threaded conversations) and does not do some things at all (replication of content to many sites).
Well, in a conversation today it came out that Microsoft will support public folders in E14. Many of us were shocked, surprised, and very happy! The Microsofties in the conversation were surprised that we were surprised – they said that they had told us this ‘way back in 2006! They pointed to this blog post by Scott Schnoll from June of 2006.
Well, now we know! I’m sure we’ll hear more about this Real Soon Now ™.

Public Folders in Exchange 14… is a post from: Virtu-Al.
Virtu-Al is one of the authors of VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration"

Buy it now from: Amazon USA Amazon UK Sybex