We’ve been gradually ramping up our coverage of the Exchange Management Shell and the capabilities of PowerShell here at The Email Admin, and it’s great to see that Microsoft hasn’t slacked off when it comes to the EMS and PS either. There’s a new tool out, currently in beta, which shows all the signs of being a command-line junkee’s new crave.

The Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell is a new graphical tool that can help you navigate all the twists and turns of using Windows PowerShell. The tool is designed to make finding, understanding, and reusing existing scripts as quick and easy as possible. Whether those scripts are of your own creation, created by your coworkers, or contributed by others to online repositories, Script Explorer is built to help you find, and use, just what you need as quickly and as easily as possible. Continue reading Scripting with Microsoft Script Explorer

It’s time to start getting serious about using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). With so many management functions moving to the EMS, and with all the amazing capabilities of the shell, you should be very excited about learning more about the EMS. We’ve had several introductory posts on The Email Admin lately, now it’s time to start applying this knowledge with an overview of some of the most frequently used commands. Since we are email admins, it makes sense to start our journey to the dark side of the command line with managing mailboxes using Get-Mailbox, New-Mailbox, Set-Mailbox, and Remove-Mailbox. Continue reading Get Started with EMS Using Get-Mailbox

If you’ve ever used the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant (ExDeploy), you may be interested to learn that Microsoft recently updated ExDeploy to include scenarios for both Exchange 2010 SP2 and Office 365 Hybrid Deployments. If you have not seen this tool before, and you are considering an upgrade of your existing Exchange environment, or a new Exchange 2010 deployment, you owe it to yourself to check out ExDeploy to see what it can do for you. Continue reading ExDeploy Updated for SP2

The Exchange team at Microsoft keeps on knocking them out of the park, and they’ve released yet another great tool to the public. This one is for helping out on difficult Outlook issues. The Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT) was released earlier this month. This tool was developed by two of Microsoft’s support engineers, and combines over 30 years of their troubleshooting experience into a tool designed to make solving problems with the Outlook client as quick and easy as possible. Continue reading The Microsoft Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool

Becoming comfortable, and even skilled, at using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) is going to take time, repetition, and it certainly helps if you can pick up some quick tips and tricks to make it seem less arcane, and more friendly. Here’s a list of ten quick tricks to help you get a little more comfortable with the EMS and also a little more efficient early on. Continue reading 10 Tricks in the Exchange Management Shell

Last time we talked about troubleshooting ActiveSync issues from the perspective of the client, particularly with regard to account issues and certificate issues. But sometimes, an ActiveSync issue may be one that you cannot get to from the client side, either because the client is remote, or the device is not as open, or it could be a more wide-spread issue that is just going to be more manageable if you focus on the server side of things. To do that, there are some great tools out there to narrow in quickly on the nature of the issue, even if you don’t have an ActiveSync device on hand with which to test. Continue reading Troubleshooting ActiveSync from the CAS Server

ActiveSync is a fantastic protocol that enables mobile devices from practically any manufacturer to connect their mobile device to Exchange 2010 and sync email, contacts, calendars, and more. The ActiveSync protocol provides a secure way to support these mobile devices, and empowers the Exchange admin to enforce security policies upon these devices without ever having to physically touch them, or even to “own” them which is extremely good news for admins facing the need to allow personally owned devices to connect to Exchange, a la BYOD.

ActiveSync usually “just works” and if it works for one user, it will work for all, but every once in a while you run into a case where a specific device just won’t play nice, and that is when you need to troubleshoot ActiveSync. When that user is remote, this becomes extremely difficult to do, but we’re going to give you some tips to help you along the way. Continue reading How to Troubleshoot Remote Client ActiveSync Connections

As you begin to dig deeper and deeper into Exchange 2010 (or 2007) administration, you will find yourself spending increasing amounts of time in the Exchange Management Shell (EMS). Your daily mailbox and user maintenance activities can be done in the GUI, but even those activities can become more efficient when you use the EMS, and script actions that must be done frequently. One problem many admins (myself included) have with using EMS is that it can be challenging to remember just exactly what you did, or in what order, and sometimes you would love to do again what you did last week, but you just cannot remember the switches you used, or find that KB article (I knew I should have bookmarked, but I didn’t).

Other times, you may just want to have the ability to show what you did or did not do, when someone else asks about something that happened or didn’t. Having a record to refer to is useful in all of these circumstances, but recording screenshots is too unwieldy and doesn’t really let you copy and paste a command from last week into a shell session you are running now. That’s where the start-transcript command comes in. Built into PowerShell and therefore available to you in the Exchange Management Shell, start-transcript is a command that will start and maintain a text file record of everything you do during an EMS session. This handy utility creates that record of what you did and how you did it, providing you with just the thing to review, or use to repeat, actions when necessary. Continue reading Put EMS on the Record with Start-Transcript

Whether you are an Exchange admin looking to move to a hosted service like Office 365, are considering a migration from your legacy Exchange infrastructure to Exchange 2010, consolidating servers and/or datacenters, or are just trying to optimize server placement, you will be faced with several challenges regarding your network and just how much bandwidth is enough. While benchmarks and recommended practices have been around for years, most of us who have been in that position just took a swag and rounded up to the next random number, and told our boss we needed bigger pipes. After all, there’s no such thing as too much bandwidth, as long as the costs don’t hit your budget.

But if we want to do a better job of estimating our bandwidth requirements, and we really should, there’s a great new tool from Microsoft available now called the Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator. This calculator is actually an Excel workbook with a number of calculations built-in, that enables you to enter your client values across four distinct user profiles, your mix of these profiles and their Outlook versions by site, and then can give you an accurate assessment of the bandwidth required to support those users. Take that value, and if it is less than the existing bandwidth at a site, you should be good to go. If more, time for a circuit upgrade. Continue reading Cool Tool: The Exchange Client Network Bandwidth Calculator

Randy Topken, a senior escalation engineer on Microsoft’s Outlook team, announced on the Exchange Team blog “You Had Me At EHLO” the release to the public of a tool he has been working on for several months. The Outlook Calendar Checking Tool, or CalCheck to its friends, was developed by Topken to help troubleshoot problems with calendars in Outlook and Exchange as well as to perform proactive checks.

The tool can work with all currently supported versions of Outlook from 2003 through 2010 (both 32 and 64 bit) and Exchange 2003 through 2010. Download the x86t version of CalCheck to work with 32bit systems, and the x64 version of CalCheck to diagnose 64 bit clients or servers. Continue reading Another Cool Tool for Troubleshooting – CalCheck