The following is a blog entry from one of my colleagues that I am currently working with at the moment. This is written in his style. Thank you John for taking the time putting this together and sharing your experience. Requirement: The boss asked us how much effort would be involved in finding all emails sent from the company to another organisation over an extended period. Thankfully the answer is that this is relatively straightforward. Solution 1, Journal mailbox – no good We have an Exchange journaling mailbox configured that is aimed at queries such as this. The problem was…

Running PowerShell for Office 365 allows you to tweak additional settings for cloud based accounts. There are several pre-requisites that need to occur prior to running Office 365 PowerShell commands / cmdlets. You will need to install the Microsoft Online PowerShell module from Microsoft. More information on how to install and configure Windows PowerShell can be found here. Once you have installed the module, run the following: Import-module msonline $LiveCred=Get-Credential Connect-MsolService –Credential $LiveCred Run the following 3 commands to connect Windows PowerShell to the Office 365 exchange service: $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ –Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection…

This is how a colleague (John) and I at work managed to copy only permissions for files from a source to target folder. Each directory containing the exact same files. What happened, somebody copied the files to a new location but didn’t copy permissions at the same time, so we did this step at the end as a final step instead. At first we spent several long hours using Ropycopy, but this didn’t work and we eventually gave up. We tried the following robocopy commands: robocopy "\\<servername>\OLD_Information\T-E-S-T" “\\<servername>\Information\T-E-S-T” /e /secfix /copyall /xo /xn /xc /r:2 /w:1 /LOG+:c:\Log1.log /TEE robocopy "\\<servername>\OLD_Information\T-E-S-T"…

From a Windows Server 2012 or Windows 8 machine, you might get the following message when connecting to an SMB2 share or network location. <server> is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. An unexpected network error occurred. You need to update the server or SAN where the shares are hosted, alternatively run the following PowerShell command on the machine where you’re connecting from: Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters" RequireSecureNegotiate -Value 0 -Force Be sure to run PowerShell as administrator if user account…

The following commands are examples to get mailbox sizes for users mailboxes per Exchange database. This gives you both the actual mailbox size and the dumpster (Soft-Deleted) items, items which have been shift-deleted from any folders, or deleted from Outlook’s deleted items folder. To get a list of all users mailbox sizes per database in descending order, run the following command: Get-MailboxStatistics –database <DataBase> | Sort-Object TotalItemSize -Descending | ft DisplayName,@{label="TotalItemSize(MB)";expression={$_.TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()}},@{label="TotalDeletedItemSize(MB)";expression={$_.totaldeleteditemsize.Value.ToMB()}},ItemCount I refer to this link, it talks about the TotalDeletedItemSize, this refers to the email sitting in the dumpster which is accessible from the users perspective using Outlook’s Recover…

Some examples below is granting full mailbox permissions to users without the auto mapping feature. Run the following command to grant full mailbox access to a single mailbox: Add-MailboxPermission –Identity <mailbox> –User <user> -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType all -Automapping $false Or, to give a user access full access permissions to all mailboxes, run: Get-Mailbox | Add-MailboxPermission –User <user> -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType all -Automapping $false  

To get the serial number of a server/computer from the command line, run the following command: wmic bios get serialnumber

You can use PowerShell to change registry values in Windows. Below, I give a few different examples of how to use the cmdlet in varies scenarios. From the Microsoft knowledge base article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154596 How to configure RPC dynamic port allocation to work with firewalls, below is the PowerShell way, using 4 separate PowerShell cmdlets in the same order: New-Item -Path HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\Internet New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\Internet -Name Ports -PropertyType MultiString -Value 5984-5994 New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\Internet -Name PortsInternetAvailable -PropertyType String -Value Y New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Rpc\Internet -Name UseInternetPorts -PropertyType String -Value Y To disable IPv6, run the following cmdlet: New-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\TCPIP6\Parameters -Name DisabledComponents…

You can use PowerShell to export alerts from SCOM 2010 to a CSV file with lots of information included. Please note, exported alerts are listed in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) time zone. #Closed Critical Alerts get-scomalert -criteria ‘ResolutionState=255 AND Severity>=2’ | select MonitoringObjectDisplayName,Name,Severity,ResolutionState,TimeRaised,TimeResolved,Parameters | export-csv c:\ClosedCriticalAlerts.txt #New Critical Alerts get-scomalert -criteria ‘ResolutionState=0 AND Severity>=2’ | select MonitoringObjectDisplayName,Name,Severity,ResolutionState,TimeRaised,Parameters | export-csv c:\NewCriticalAlerts.txt #New Warning Alerts get-scomalert -criteria ‘ResolutionState=0 AND Severity>=2’ | select MonitoringObjectDisplayName,Name,Severity,ResolutionState,TimeRaised,Parameters | export-csv c:\NewWarningAlerts.txt Resolution State 0 = New 255 = Closed Severity Values for Alerts 0 = INFORMATIONAL 1 = WARNING 2 = CRITICAL

Use PowerShell to export a list of mail enabled users from Exchange 2010: Get-User -ResultSize Unlimited | Where { $_.RecipientType -eq ‘UserMailbox’ } | ft firstname,lastname,samaccountname The following command will export the list to a CSV file: Get-User -ResultSize Unlimited | Where { $_.RecipientType -eq ‘UserMailbox’ } | select firstname,lastname,samaccountname | export-csv c:\MailEnabledUsers.txt