Skype for administrators

Call any user in Active Directory or Exchange right from your administrative console, with a single click dial into any conference call (with participant passcode dialed for you ) – all of that is possible with the latest extension for PowerGUI.

PowerGUI Skype PowerPack adds Call buttons for all user accounts and mailboxes, as well as people in your corporate organizational chart. In addition to this you can obviously call any of your Skype contacts or any conference call appointments listed in your Outlook.

Check out this 7-minute demo here (highly recommended to watch in HD and full screen):

As always, all the code behind any nodes and actions can be found in their properties, so you can learn how this actually works, modify the pack to suite your needs or extend it to add calling capabilities to whichever other systems you are managing!

This blog post by Shafqat Ahmed helped me a lot when I started working on the PowerPack. My scripts in the pack are basically enhancements built on top of his excellent post.

Download Skype PowerPack here and let us know what you think.

Tags: AD, Active Directory, Demo, Exchange, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, Skype
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TechEd South Africa session on PowerGUI

If you are attending TechEd in Durban in a couple of weeks make sure you see Nicolas Blank delivering his UNC304 session:

PowerShell and Unified Communications: Taking the Mystery out of AD, Exchange and OCS Management using PowerShell (UNC304)

PowerShell is wonderful – if you know where to start or how to use it! This session will cover how to get started with PowerShell as well as moving into advanced areas of Exchange and OCS management with PowerShell. We will cover common management and migration scenarios where PowerShell can add value, learning how to run “one liners” that can “change the world” as well as using the Power of PowerShell in PowerGUI in order to have the best of both worlds – PowerShell flexibility and GUI management and much much more.

UNC304 | Mon 3 Aug (12:00 – 13:00) | 300 – Advanced| Session Room B1 | Speaker: Nicolas Blank | Breakout Session

Nicolas is an Exchange MVP and Unified Communications guru. He was one of the first guys who started using PowerShell to manage Exchange 2003 back in 2007. This year he is delivering 4 TechEd sessions! Quite an achievement. Congratulations to Nicolas and make sure you see him if you are at the show.

Tags: Conferences, Exchange, OCS, PowerGUI, PowerShell, TechEd
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Restore Exchange data from PowerShell

Working with mail backups can be a pain. Especially when you need to do some kind of bulk operations like scan backups for particular mailboxes and find all emails with certain keywords and then export then to a PST or add them to a public folder.

Quest has recently PowerShell-enabled its Exchange/Notes/PST backup/recovery product – and we got a lot of great functionality available for your scripts/command line.

Here are a few examples:

• Here’s how you can attach a standard Exchange backup and retrieve its messages as .msg files:

Attach-RMEExchangeDB -EdbPath "C:\Data\Edb\EdbSearchTest\EdbSearchTest.edb" | Get-RMEMessage | Export-RMEMessage -ExportPath "C:\Data\Exported\Msg" -Type Msg

• Or look for particular keywords in Lotus Notes data:

Attach-RMELotusDB "C:\Data\Nsf" | Get-RMEMessage -SearchIn Subject, Body -Text "test" | Export-RMEMessage -ExportPath "C:\Data\Exported\Eml" -Type Eml

• Or restore a folder to PST:

Attach-RMEExchangeDB "C:\Data\Edb\EdbSearchTest\EdbSearchTest.edb" | Get-RMEFolder "John Doe\Inbox" | Restore-RMEFolder -TargetPath "C:\Data\Restored\Pst"
Obviously you can restore to live mailboxes and public folders, work with attachments, and so on, and so forth.

Here’s full list of the cmdlets – each of the pages has examples and details on parameters, etc.:

• Get-RMEMailbox
• Restore-RMEMailbox

• Get-RMEFolder
• Restore-RMEFolder

• Get-RMEMessage
• Restore-RMEMessage
• Export-RMEMessage

• Export-RMEAttachment
• Get-RMEAttachment

• Attach-RMEExchangeDB
• Extract-RMEExchangeDB

• Attach-RMEExchangeMailbox
• Attach-RMEExchangePublicFolders

• Attach-RMEPersonalDB
• Attach-RMELotusDB

Note that unlike AD cmdlets these are actually a part of commercial product so there is cost involved. You can get a trial license from the product page. If you are a Microsoft MVP you can also get a free NFR license by applying here.

Exchange 14 PowerGUI wallpaper

Oz (Exchange MVP doing a great series of Exchange/PowerShell/PowerGUI How-To’s) has also posted a bunch of Exchange 2010 desktop wallpapers – one of them featuring PowerGUI.

Download them here.

Tags: Exchange, PowerGUI, PowerShell, Wallpaper
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Blog series on PowerGUI, PowerShell and Exchange 2007

Oz is doing a great series on managing Exchange 2007 with PowerShell and PowerGUI. Within last week he has posted quite a few really useful scripts which should be in every Exchange administrator’s toolbox – check them out:

• PS Sent Mail Script
• EDB SIZE FOR EACH DATABASE PS with PowerGUI
• Get-ExchangeServer Mailbox Count
• Get-ExchangeServer PS with PowerGUI
• Get-ExchangeServer | Get-MailboxDatabase
• PowerGUI mailbox Count per mail Store
• POWER GUI PowerShell

And Oz still keeps doing this almost every single day! So please go to the blog and subscribe to the updates!

Tags: Exchange, Exchange 2007, PowerGUI, PowerShell
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Exchange 2003 PowerGUI webcast

Darin has posted the webcast he did with Jonathan Medd some time ago to the PowerGUI.org documentation page (second item in the Videos and Flash Demos section).

It’s a fascinating 15 minute interview featuring a demo of how PowerGUI and PowerShell can be used to manage Exchange 2003. Check it out here.

Tags: Demo, Exchange, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerShell, Webcast
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Evan Dodds to present at TEC 2009

Just saw that Evan Dodds is on the Exchange track agenda with his Microsoft Windows PowerShell Scripting for Microsoft Exchange Server session.

Evan’s session are must-attend if you are managing Exchange and are interested in PowerShell. He is extremely knowledgeable (no surprise here – he is one of the key guys designing Exchange PowerShell implementation ) and just a great speaker.

This is in addition to a few other PowerShell sessions at TEC which I reported earlier.

Registration and more details can obviously be found at the conference web site.

Tags: Conferences, DEC, Exchange, Exchange 2007, PowerShell
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PowerShell at DEC 2009

Looks like agenda for DEC 2009 (March 22-25) is almost settled by now – and it does have a few PowerShell sessions in there: Darren Mar-Elia (who gave the PowerShell world GPO management!) and Brian Desmond (another well-known AD MVP) are both going to present various tips and tricks on AD management with PowerShell.

I love DEC (DEC 2007 was one of the first conferences where AD cmdlets were first demoed by Richard in his PowerShell talk). If you are in AD/Identity Management world this is the conference to attend. The content is very deep and the peers you meet are very knowledgeable. Just check out the speaker line-up and the agenda so far.

This year they are also adding a whole new subconference on Exchange and messaging – hence the name change from DEC to TEC – which means more agenda conflicts if you are into both. Rob Allen is giving a PowerShell talk over there.

For those of us preferring Berlin to Vegas – there’s TEC Europe in September (obviously next September).

The early bird discounts seem to still apply. Register now and see you at the event!

Tags: Active Directory, Conferences, DEC, Directory Experts Conference, Exchange, Exchange 2007, PowerShell
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Connect-Service for Exchange cmdlets?

Is it just me or is there no cmdlet similar to Connect-QADService for Exchange 2007?

My workstation is not in the forest which has the Exchange organization which I need to manage. Does that mean I now need to add the -Credential $mycreds -DomainController my.domain.local for each and every Exchange cmdlet instead of just connecting once and then working against a specific DC under certian credentials?..

Tags: Exchange, PowerShell
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Exchange 2003 PowerPack!

Did you know you could do that much with PowerShell on Exchange 2003?

We all kind of knew that Exchange 2000 and 2003 can be managed with PowerShell via WMI or AD but Jonathan Medd has just taken this to the whole new level!

His powerpack for Exchange 2003 has 53 (!) different nodes/links/actions exposing features ranging from mailbox and server management to address books and message queues.

And because this is a PowerGUI pack, you can see all the PowerShell code behind each and every item by just clicking the PowerShell Code tab, or even tweak the things a bit by going into the Properties.

This is a great piece of work obviously making Jonathan the front-runner of the PowerPack Challenge 2008 (you obviously have 2 weeks ahead to challenge this )

Check out the Exchange 2003 PowerPack and please let Jonathan know what you think.

Tags: Exchange, PowerGUI, PowerPack, PowerPack Challenge, PowerShell
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